I'm using whatever BigInt came with ActivePerl... It's likely not the latest. It does occur to me that I can probably do something like:

$bits=int((length($bigint)-1) * 3.3219)+1;

where 3.3219 is log(10)/log(2) and the length of $bigint is relatively large assuming that length($bigint) returns the length of the string / ie number of decimals.

It also occurred to me that I could do a manual conversion to float by something like this:

$float=substr($bigint,1,1).'.'.substr($bigint,2).'e'.(length($bigint)-2);

where the point is to create a float string value out of the bigint string value...

Either of these might work, but they're a bit ugly...

j