Just use bignums. Seriously, a decent type system can use smaller representations for efficiency and not accidentally break the world. That way, one can repre

Just use bignums. Seriously, a decent type system can use smaller representations for efficiency and not accidentally break the world. That way, one can represent the numbers found in cryptography as … numbers, instead of opaque Base64- or (God help one) ASN.1-encoded byte sequences. Machine words are an efficiency hack.