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What every Computer Scientist should be asking about Floating-point arithmetic: Why aren't there types for fixed-point/rational arithmetic exposed by your language and/or standard library?



Would also love 128 bit ints to be commonly available. And I even have a use for them: representing the size in bytes of some extremely large storage configurations (sparse ones -- as yet a fully allocated > 2^64 byte store would cost several billions).


Don't most of the newer languages have these types? And even the older languages support them now with their most popular libraries (e.g. C++/Boost).


Because most popular languages are a leaky abstraction on top of the CPUs they were built for.




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