>>Thanks, George. Yes, I've realized, that PADL would not work. I made few experiments to confirm it. Well, your solution seems to be the simplest and working one.
>
>I think the reason that no one else thought of it (at least immediately) is that the function isn't widely used or even understood. In thinking more about the problem, I think it's easy to come up with a work around to the length limitation by simply concatenating the results of two calls to BINTOC().

Actually, I use this function in my indexes very often. Just wanted to give the original idea, since you already mentioned it :)