Thanks for your thoughts, tachyon.
You say you are converting to hex but then go on to say And using pack and unpack makes them unprintable, which is annoying.
Right, I meant that's why I'm converting to hex instead of using pack and unpack. Those whole-string bit operations look pretty tempting, though...Perhaps the right thing to do is only convert to and from hex when I get data from the user, and store the data as bitstrings, using code like the above. Hmmm...

In reply to Re^2: Best way to represent somewhat large values in a module by sgifford
in thread Best way to represent somewhat large values in a module by sgifford

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