I'm no pack expert, but I do happen to have otherwise-identical installs of perl (version 5.8.9) from MacPorts on a 32-bit PPC running Mac OS X.4.10, and a 64-bit Intel machine running Mac OS X.5.8:

$ perl -e'print pack q/d*/,(1.7453026326120991e+194,1.5156845462257262
+e-147)'
hC yrreM!samtsir
[download]

(on the 32-bit machine) and

$ perl -e'print pack q/d*/,(1.7453026326120991e+194,1.5156845462257262
+e-147)'
Merry Christmas!
[download]

(on the 64-bit machine). I'm not seeing a spurious ‘K’ or ‘t’, but I am seeing an unexpected reversal—and, hey, the PPC uses a different endian-ness from the Intel ….

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