>I've long held that floating point with a decimal exponent You mean IEEE745 Decimals? Decimals also have serious pitfalls. For many applications they are jus

>I've long held that floating point with a decimal exponent You mean IEEE745 Decimals? Decimals also have serious pitfalls. For many applications they are just worse and lead to more problems. In the end they are at least as confusing as floats. And switching to them as the default would make programs generally worse. > Like many reforms in computing, performance is used as an excuse to maintain the status quo of the priesthood. Very silly argument. Performance is not the issue. Floats are useful because of their range. Even if input and output are small, intermediate results can easily be very large and exceed the representable decimals. Every programmer has to learn that the computer does not understand real numbers and that expecting it to is entirely misguided. No different representation will change that.