To make various computations, you generally need powers of a given quantity. It seems to me that when you take large powers for intermediate results, the precis

To make various computations, you generally need powers of a given quantity. It seems to me that when you take large powers for intermediate results, the precision in fixed point arithmetic will rapidly drop, no? Furthermore you need to put together various quantities with different scaling factors. IMHO, that would make things very error prone (or you can again sacrifice precision). I am not aware of any physical problem that actually requires 128 bit floats. I can make up some, but those would be either chaotic (in which case precision does not help), or I would be telling you about a solution that looks like it can be improved. There are of course some problems for which we have no physical insight, then high precision provides a nice safety buffer.