True, but I think you're picking at hairs here. The suggestion in the R5RS spec is that you shouldn't need to worry about the segregation of integer and real t

True, but I think you're picking at hairs here. The suggestion in the R5RS spec is that you shouldn't need to worry about the segregation of integer and real types (unless you need to). And indeed, why should you? It's a conceptual shift away from char, int, long, float and double, which exist only because they're easier for the computer to deal with. Scheme was the first language I used that attempted to treat numbers like numbers. Besides, Exactness is required in R5RS and the full numerical stack is no longer optional in R6RS.