@seanmason There's not much I can do about that limitation at the moment, because I only have enough time right now to use the 'pow' function supplied by the C standard library.  However, you make a good point that there could be some confusion about this method's behavior.  I've added a test case to this branch which confirms that an exception is thrown when the the C standard library's pow(...) function returns a value that can't fit in an IEEE-754 double-precision value.  I just added it to this branch, see commit 88a38f0...

If this were my code base, I'd probably also add a Javadoc comment to he method indicating this limitation.  However, since there rest of the code lacks Javadoc comments, I wouldn't want to start selectively introducing them unless the code's primary maintainer (@stepthom, I assume) agreed.