bug in string:copies when copying float times character

[PAILLEAU Eric]

Hello,
I found something weird, that can be considered as a bug.
Here is below the documentation for string:copies function.

---------------------------------------
copies(String, Number) -> Copies

Types:
String = Copies = string()
Number = integer()
---------------------------------------

Number should obviously be an integer, but it seems there no
guards on the type.

I forgot do round my copy number of characters, I got crashes, and I
finally found the problem :

by doing :
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Erlang R14A (erts-5.8) [source] [smp:2:2] [rq:2] [async-threads:0]
[hipe] [kernel-poll:false]

Eshell V5.8  (abort with ^G)
1> string:copies("a",2.5).

Crash dump was written to: erl_crash.dump
eheap_alloc: Cannot allocate 1140328500 bytes of memory (of type "heap").
--------------------------------------------------------------------

Erlang try to allocate the whole memory when trying to copy any float
number of characters. My computer is frozen a while, and reach hopefully
to garbage .

I got same behaviour in R13 and I did update to R14 in order to see if a
fix was done.

I guess an en exception 'badarith' or something else should be raised if
integer is not used on such function.

Best regards.