Not quite what you asked, but how about transforming the problem domain and using logarithms? It's monotonic increasing, so the sort order remains the same. Different bases are scaled by an easily calculated factor and if you need the big integer, then you leave the calculation to the end.

Sometimes I can think of 6 impossible LDAP attributes before breakfast.

In reply to Re: Efficiently working with huge exponents by Ea
in thread Efficiently working with huge exponents by wanna_code_perl

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