It seems to be a complicated way to explain that, if you need decimal values, you can just multiply then by a power of two internally. e.g. if you just need a r

It seems to be a complicated way to explain that, if you need decimal values, you can just multiply then by a power of two internally. e.g. if you just need a resolution of 1/256 (a case that comes to mind are measures coming from a analog-to-digital converter), you just multiply everything by 256 and do your arithmetic as usual. Or actually you don't have to do anything except remember to scale your constants the same way and do the conversion for I/Os where needed. Might be wise to protect those values with a dedicated type to prevent mistakes. The "saturation" thing in the article is a joke; no way you can get correct results at the end if you cap the result of computations on overflow. That's slightly better than letting the overflow happen, but the right thing to do is to throw an error, not silently min/max the result.