This all started when you said:<p>&gt; Floats are storage formats for approximations of numbers. Floats are, by definition, not relevant if one wants to store an exact number exactly.<p>This is setting up a dichotomy of float=approximate, and the implied contrast is that Perl 6 rationals are exact.<p>Float is &quot;by definition, not relevant if one wants to store an exact number exactly.&quot;<p>You didn&#x27;t say &quot;an exact rational,&quot; you said &quot;an exact number.&quot;  Your implication is that other representations <i>are</i> relevant if one wants to store an exact number exactly.  You don&#x27;t say rational, so you imply that other representations can represent an arbitrary number exactly.<p>If you try to advertise Perl 6 as &quot;exact&quot;, in comparison to those messy floats, you&#x27;re going to get people who are very unhappy when they find out that 2pi &#x2F; 2 isn&#x27;t exactly pi.<p>And you&#x27;re also shortchanging people who use eg. JavaScript doubles as exact integer indices every day.  X&#x2F;1 isn&#x27;t a &quot;silly&quot; case, integers are extremely relevant across all kinds of calculations.<p>People who want to truly understand this landscape need to understand the contrasts between various number representations and the pros and cons of each.  No representation can represent every real number perfectly, so everyone is going to run up against inexactness in their calculations unless they know how to restrict the domain of their calculations to numbers that can be perfectly represented with their chosen number representation.