Integer representation

[meepbear *]

I have a rather pesky bug I've wasted the past few hours on trying to track 
it down: DH assertions work fine except 1 in every so many will fail for no 
apparant reason.

My best guess so far is that it has to do with integer representations. For 
instance if I have 0x8000 hexadecimal is that supposed to go down the wire 
as "8000" or "08000" or "008000"?
I have no idea how Perl store its bigints so I need some help with this :).

It's either a problem with the most significant bit that would signal a 
negative number if they're not unsigned in which case I'd just need to pad 
with a leading zero(s) and/or an alignment problem in which case I would 
need to know if they're word or double word aligned.