Bignums or other constructs are good answers sometimes, and not others. They can help you avoid various bits of piddling about, but at the expense of having an

Bignums or other constructs are good answers sometimes, and not others. They can help you avoid various bits of piddling about, but at the expense of having an entirely different structure that subsequent maintainers might not be familiar with. On the other hand, the standard floating point system has been in sue for a long time, has well-developed libraries, and a large body of material devoted to understanding when you need to be careful, and when you don't. In short, calculations of this type need understanding, either of the floating point domain or of an alternative domain, but certainly of the existence of the issues and problems.