Problem
You have stumbled on an unknown civilization while sailing around the world. The people, who call themselves Zebronians, do math using 40 separate characters (probably because there are 40 stripes on a zebra). They would very much like to use computers but would need a computer to do Zebronian math, which would mean a computer that could represent all 40 characters. You are a computer designer and decide to help them. You decide the best thing is to use BCZ, which stands for Binary-Coded Zebronian.
How many bits will you need to represent each character if you want to use the minimum number of bits? How will you use extra bit sequences that are not needed to represent a character? What arithmetic and/or logic operations will be supported and how will this be accomplished?