I meant to suggest that 30 years ago the performance difference between "floats" (floating-point binary) and "BigDecimal"-style arbitrary-precision floating-poi

I meant to suggest that 30 years ago the performance difference between "floats" (floating-point binary) and "BigDecimal"-style arbitrary-precision floating-point decimal would have been much more significant to many more real-world use cases, compared to now. So that may have been a reason not to make them the default when you simply write a literal `5.4` in code, but that argument is less now.