The situations that deal with numbers that large are usually a bit nuanced. (i.e., "it's 1 in 2^63 of the time that I need bignums for day-to-day programming").

The situations that deal with numbers that large are usually a bit nuanced. (i.e., "it's 1 in 2^63 of the time that I need bignums for day-to-day programming"). I agree that losing accuracy needlessly sucks (and I've been burned by floating-point), but 64 bit ints are usually good enough. I'm thirsty for counterexamples.