Arithmetic strange behaviour on numbers bigger than 0xFFFFFFFFFFFFF

[BEAUGY Alexandre]

Dear all,

Today, I experienced the following strange behaviour of gawk:

$ gawk 'BEGIN{x=0xA000000000000}{++x}{print x}' input.file
2814749767106561
2814749767106562
2814749767106563
2814749767106564

$ gawk 'BEGIN{x=0xA0000000000000}{++x}{print x}' input.file
45035996273704960
45035996273704960
45035996273704960
45035996273704960

How could that be? Why is my counter incremented in one case and not in
the other one? Did I correctly use awk? Or didn't I?

I read that gawk was able to manipulate 64-bits integer. That's why I
incremented such a big counter, in my awk script.

Thanks a lot in advance.

Regards,

-- 
Alexandre BEAUGY