in reply to BigInt and octal input

You pretty much have to work at the string level, since if you could guarentee the input would fit in a normal integer, you wouldn't be bothering to use a BigInt library.

----
I wanted to explore how Perl's closures can be
manipulated, and ended up creating an object
system by accident.
-- Schemer

: () { :|:& };:

Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated