$number wasn't guaranteed to be a whole number (and I guess that makes % fail)
No, Perl is OK with that:
3:03 >perl -MData::Dump -wE "my @array; $array[5.35968 % 2] = 42; dd
+\@array;"
[undef, 42]
3:03 >
But the original loop almost certainly wasn’t doing what you thought it was. With an initial value of 192:
3:03 >perl -wE "my $iterations = 0; my $number = 192; while ($number
+!= 0) { $number /= 2; ++$iterations; } say qq[$iterations iterations]
+;"
1083 iterations
3:06 >
The loop terminates when $number is zero, but (on my Perl, which is 64-bit) this test doesn’t succeed until division by two has reduced $number all the way down to half of 4.94065645841247 × 10-324 — which is a very small number!
Hope that helps,
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