Christopher A. Craig wrote:

...

i needed to implement this myself and was thinking of storing the digits of an integer in a list.

That's sort of what Python does except the "digits" are 15 bits, not base 10. Doing it in base 10 would be a huge pain because of the problems with base 10->base 2 conversion.

Indeed. Python's Decimal data type stores the digits in a list for ease of power of 10 multiplication & rounding (the precision rules means a *lot* of that goes on). However, it converts that list of digits to a long integer in order to do addition, multiplication or division. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@email.com | Brisbane, Australia --------------------------------------------------------------- http://boredomandlaziness.skystorm.net