[msla]

> Over the past 50 years, my computer has adapted to how humans normally operate in nearly every other way. Why do they continue to use this system which produces results different from what any normal person expects?

Lisps and Lisp-derived languages, like Scheme, have had a proper numerical tower, including rationals, for decades now. Using reals is optional, but using rationals and everything else imposes an efficiency cost, so people make their decision. Implementing rationals in hardware would not necessarily make them more efficient; that is, if you think having rational support in hardware would help, you have to make the case. It isn't an automatic win:

https://yosefk.com/blog/its-done-in-hardware-so-its-cheap.ht...

[ken]

The numerical tower is one of the features of Lisp that the Algol descendants have not yet stolen, and I don’t know why not.

“Efficiency” is tough to believe given all the other inefficient yet nice features that have been universally adopted, like Unicode, variable length lists, bigints, etc. In many dynamic languages, every method call is a hash table lookup, yet we’re expected to believe they don’t use Decimals by default because it would be too slow? In C++ I’d buy that excuse.