&gt; Defaulting to a Binary Encoded Decimal is also silly because its not as performant and loses compactness.<p>Defaulting to correctness makes a lot more sense than often premature time and space optimizations by default.<p>&gt; What is your suggestion, having a default floating point have a Binary or hexadecimal representation for literals?<p>There&#x27;s lots of good solutions (Scheme&#x27;s, of having a numeric tower with literals using the minimal-scope exact representation -- e.g., integer if there is no fractional part, decimal if its a decimal literal, rational if it is rational literal not expressed as a decimal -- by default unless they have an modifier specifying intent to use an inexact representation) is the best.