Given that it's a dynamic scripting language, I think double was the best choice they could have made. It gives serious number crunching performance, an integer

Given that it's a dynamic scripting language, I think double was the best choice they could have made. It gives serious number crunching performance, an integer range up to 2^53, and, of course, double precision floating point math. The only better choice they could have made would have been to make it static/strongly typed with various numeric types.