APWIN Basic ?

I'm trying to get a program to tell me the version of a dll file and the version of some hardware I'm using. Both should be chars, but that datatype isn't available in apwin basic. The only data type that allows me to run the program is a double, but the output I get is something like 1.59(few more numbers here)E-317. Not sure how to handle this exponential. Tried converting to different datatypes, nothing worked for me so far.

I'm expecting both versions to be "2.1" ...any tips on how to convert that exponential to get the 2.1?

i'm not if this can help you.
but this free utility shows you all exported functions in a dll.
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/dll_export_viewer.html

Just a guess, but maybe the data is ASCII (or similar) and you're interpreting the bits as a double, giving seemingly garbage numbers. It would help to see the full number, but it would help more to see the double converted to hex.