Coming in to the thread _way_ late, here's my $0.015: Sure, it would be great to have an accurate and fast implementation of decimal/floating point numbers active by default in the language. We don't have that yet. We have a fast implementation, and we have an accurate one, and until we have both, there is a decision to be made: which one is easy to use (in builtins, has literals, (etc.?)), and which one is the "opt-in" implementation (needs a module import, needs a constructor)? We've been dealing with roughly the same fast and sometimes-inaccurate floating-point implementation for what, almost 40 years of C programming so far. Given that there exist accurate implementations of decimal numbers (GMP, MAPM), why hasn't C moved to make one of these the "default" implementation? Whatever the answer, it seems to me that this sets a sort of precedent in programming that fast floating-point numbers are favored over accurate floating-point numbers. GMP is blindingly fast, and it isn't C's default. Decimal is, I think I saw someone mention "hundreds of times slower" than the current float implementation. I think, until the decimal implementation approaches something like GMP's speed, there really isn't much point in even considering making it a default. Now, to the question of a 'decimal literal': Including support for something like '1.1d' requires that we include the decimal module in builtins. Now, I don't know that there's no way around this, but it seems like a slowdown for everyone just to let a few people type a bit less. -1 -- Cheers, Leif