They do, until you throw in some negative numbers. They munge the sign into the last character.

Ah yes. That's a pain to deal with.

I'll look into how much work is involved -- there is also the issue of implied decimal points -- relative to the number of times it might get used.

One question. What type character would you use for bcd?

'b' is currently free, though I can see it might be useful for something else. 'd' is used and 'c' isn't particularly mnemonic.