I'm building a small BigInt library in C++ for use in my programming language. The structure is like the following: short digits[ 1000 ]; int len; I have a function that converts a string into a bigint by splitting it up into single chars and putting them into digits. The numbers in digits are all reversed, so the number 123 would look like the following: digits[0]=3 digits[1]=3 digits[2]=1 I have already managed to code the adding function, which works perfectly. It works somewhat like this: overflow = 0 for i ++ until length of both numbers exceeded: add numberA[ i ] to numberB[ i ] add overflow to the result set overflow to 0 if the result is bigger than 10: substract 10 from the result overflow = 1 put the result into numberReturn[ i ] (Overflow is in this case what happens when I add 1 to 9: Substract 10 from 10, add 1 to overflow, overflow gets added to the next digit) So think of how two numbers are stored, like those: 0 | 1 | 2 --------- A 2 - - B 0 0 1 The above represents the digits of the bigints 2 (A) and 100 (B). - means uninitialized digits, they aren't accessed. So adding the above number works fine: start at 0, add 2 + 0, go to 1, add 0, go to 2, add 1 But: When I want to do multiplication with the above structure, my program ends up doing the following: Start at 0, multiply 2 with 0 (eek), go to 1, ... So it is obvious that, for multiplication, I have to get an order like this: 0 | 1 | 2 --------- A - - 2 B 0 0 1 Then, everything would be clear: Start at 0, multiply 0 with 0, go to 1, multiply 0 with 0, go to 2, multiply 1 with 2 How can I manage to get digits into the correct form for multiplication? I don't want to do any array moving/flipping - I need performance!