"IEEE754" is ubiquitous because it was the first non-platform-specific solution to a fundamentally hard engineering problem (how to approximate the entire real

"IEEE754" is ubiquitous because it was the first non-platform-specific solution to a fundamentally hard engineering problem (how to approximate the entire real number line with a finite number of bits), and because it is supported in hardware (on the CPU itself), so that the representation of the number fits within the same registers as used for pointers, integers, and everything else, which makes it fast. If you want base-10 encoding of non-integer values, and base-10 arithmetic on them, you're probably going to need a software library like [1], which implements the decimal math that is also in IEEE754, just not part of common hardware. It also may be that you actually want infinite-precision arithmetic, which definitely requires a library, because the representation of a number becomes its own dynamic data structure (like with a string). Can you say more about what exactly is the "brokenness" that you're running up against? [1] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/tool/intel-decimal-floating-point-math-library.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...