User blog comment:Deedlit11/Bignum Bakeoff appetizer/@comment-5529393-20140916022609/@comment-5529393-20140916100828

I'm glad to see people verifying other's code, I'm probably not too reliable by myself.

However, we have no reason to expect that the program will work nicely with b = 1. We can't write a number in base-1 notation, much less hereditary base-1 notation, because 1^x =  1^y for all y. So it's okay if the program only works for b > 1.