You bicker over the digits far to the right because there tends to be ways for those inaccuracies to propagate up into your significant figures. That doesn't h

You bicker over the digits far to the right because there tends to be ways for those inaccuracies to propagate up into your significant figures. That doesn't happen from typing a few arithmetic operations into a handheld calculator. It does in a computational environment that might be looping over and summing a million or a billion elements and applying more operations to them. It became too easy and fast to use floats for real world calculations, overstressing and exposing their inadequacies. Of course, the right solution is to use the right tool for the job: algorithms that either use a better structure than a 64-bit float, or are smartly designed enough to avoid their inadequacies. But how many developers have both enough insight and enough development time to do that? Everything is a compromise; fixed-point decimal representation is one that works for many applications.