are int, float, long, double, side-effects of computer engineering?

[Russ P.]

On Mar 6, 7:25 pm, rusi <rustompm... at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mar 6, 6:11 am, Xah Lee <xah... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > some additional info i thought is relevant.
>
> > are int, float, long, double, side-effects of computer engineering?
>
> It is a bit naive for computer scientists to club integers and reals
> as mathematicians do given that for real numbers, even equality is
> undecidable!
> Mostly when a system like mathematica talks of real numbers it means
> computable real numbers which is a subset of mathematical real numbers
> (and of course a superset of floats)
>
> Seehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computable_number#Can_computable_numbers...

I might add that Mathematica is designed mainly for symbolic
computation, whereas IEEE floating point numbers are intended for
numerical computation. Those are two very different endeavors. I
played with Mathematica a bit several years ago, and I know it can do
numerical computation too. I wonder if it resorts to IEEE floating
point numbers when it does.