> Ok, you've got me really curious what these applications are. In addition to the applications others mentioned, this is an issue in applications that don't n

> Ok, you've got me really curious what these applications are. In addition to the applications others mentioned, this is an issue in applications that don't need it, but run into it. If for example a program has a bug where a number is multiplied by 2 in a loop, then if it's a double it will eventually become infinity and stop changing, but if it is a bigint then it will continue to increase. This means that the bug will have different effects in those two cases. While this is a bug, if the developer tests on only one of those platforms (say, the double), and the bug happens to not cause noticeable effects, it might go unfixed, but people on the other platform (with bigints) would get something broken (as a constantly growing bigint, eventually it will be extremely slow or run into some limit and give an exception). The basic issue is that leaving numeric types to some extent undefined means you open yourself up to risks like this. How common it will be in practice is hard to say, of course, but I've seen such things happen in another language, so I think this can't be simply ignored out of hand.