There is an elegant universal notation for integers, called "variable-width integers" or "varints" or "bigints" or similar. It is reviled amongst many, and does

There is an elegant universal notation for integers, called "variable-width integers" or "varints" or "bigints" or similar. It is reviled amongst many, and doesn't see much use. There is an elegant universal notation for rationals, called "quote notation" or "finite continued fractions" or "p-adic rationals". It is largely unknown and sees next-to-no use. There is an elegant universal notation for computable reals, called "computability". We use this all the time, but almost never for computing reals. Floating-point numbers are fussy and require careful management in order to avoid buggy algorithms. In contrast, there exists an algorithm (although it's an open problem to express it in a quick way!) for taking the fifth root of any generalized continued fraction or any Turing-computable real, in a way that allows the result to be used in further computation. Somebody should tackle the Gaussian distributions next!