[dingaling]

Why would mathematics be "completely obvious" when one is dealing with how a computer stores and represents data?

The 'clever' solution fails miserably on value zero and needs hard-coding to handle it. That looks like using the wrong tool.

[chrismorgan]

You’re misunderstanding me. I said that if you approach from the mathematics side of things, building on log₁₀ is the completely obvious approach to use. That is, if you’re already a mathematician, of course you’ll see if you can use logarithms, because that will be the way you’ll think—because you’ll view it as a mathematical and algorithmic task.

As for the handling of zero, well, that’s not about mathematics or about how a computer stores or represents data—that’s about how humans represent data. We choose to special-case zero, allowing it to have a leading zero which we never allow for anything else. All solutions in software will need to special-case zero.