> This is useful, but it also vexes me slightly because it means BigDecimal is not just for getting more precision than other numeric types, it is also for know

> This is useful, but it also vexes me slightly because it means BigDecimal is not just for getting more precision than other numeric types, it is also for knowing/controlling the amount of precision, meaning there is no type dedicated only to the former. But I suppose the cases where you want more precision tend to also be the cases where you want to know/control the precision... It's just that this demonstrably doesn't occur to everybody using the API who might just be reaching for it because "I want more precision". In practice someone who just "wants more precision" doesn't touch the precision and gets 40 significant figures of it, which will probably do what they want. Exact rationals have their own problems, and if you're not using exact rationals then however much precision you've got you'll always have rounding (as soon as you divide by anything other than 2 or 5).