Using Large Numbers

[Hawk37]

I am currently in a discrete structures course and am working on an assignment and have become stuck. What I am trying to do is write a simple encryption program that will use an RSA style encryption to encrypt a string, show the encrypted string and then decrypt the string and display the results. This is not the problem. The problem comes from the size of the numbers that occur when using RSA style encryption. How can I work (easily) with numbers of 40 digits or more?
Thank You In Advance
MEF

 

[alexboly]

Why don't you use a string of characters as the encryption key? You could use then phrases for the encryption.
Or you can use arrays of digits instead of numbers. I think that there are also classes that stand for big numbers. There is also a type in Visual C++, int64, that stands for 64 bit integer. Maybe this is enough.

 

[bitbit]

i think there's also a 128 bit integer type?