Floats are primarily designed for engineering, and not just floats. Read the original von Neumann paper. Basically, out dominant computer architectur was origin

Floats are primarily designed for engineering, and not just floats. Read the original von Neumann paper. Basically, out dominant computer architectur was originally designed to optimally support floating-point for numerical calculations. EDIT: I just looked at the paper again and realize that I was wrong. Von Neumann actually wanted to keep things simple and thus assumed all numbers to be normalized to be between -1 and 1...