This is something that was just heavily discussed on the Julia Discourse, with a big back and forth between individuals used to the computer integer arithmetic

This is something that was just heavily discussed on the Julia Discourse, with a big back and forth between individuals used to the computer integer arithmetic rules vs people wanting Python like functionality. Based on the confusion there, it definitely seems that it could be made clearer in the docs that if one wants floating point results one needs to use 10.0^17 instead of 10^17.