Earlier this year I added some commands to the ntheory module, inspired by Pari/GP and Mathematica, to split numbers into digits and put them together again. Of course this isn't terribly exciting by itself since Perl has split and join, but with optional bases it gets more interesting.

I recently took a look at the various modules that do base conversion (at least 9 modules, plus various standalone subroutines). Each has slightly different features and interfaces, and the performance at the extremes differs by over 10,000x. I've made some internal changes to ntheory based on my tests, which should show up in the next release.

Add: This is for Perl 5. Perl6 has native support for base conversions for bases 2-36 and seamless Bigint support. It Just Works. For larger bases or alternate encodings, bbkr's TinyID module can be used.