Well, to put on my pedantic hat and indulge my inner math major, what you describe is algebra on top of objects—you’re talking about the math that applies to nu

Well, to put on my pedantic hat and indulge my inner math major, what you describe is algebra on top of objects—you’re talking about the math that applies to numbers, not the numbers themselves. Specifically you described groups and fields and rings…the symbols themselves are numbers, but they don’t recombine with each other in the same way as other numbers. You’re right that they shouldn’t be implemented a numeric data types. That said, dates do have properties of modular arithmetic, so in a strange sense they are very much numbers… :p