[chrisseaton]

What practical problems do you think this could cause in specifying or measuring time?

[bobdobbs666]

The patriot missile system tended to miss due to numerical error accumulated due to using floats to count time.

http://www-users.math.umn.edu/~arnold//disasters/patriot.htm...

[chrisseaton]

> due to using floats

No they weren't using floats. The article you've linked to says this really clearly.

> This calculation was performed using a 24 bit fixed point register

[bobdobbs666]

http://www.cs.unc.edu/~smp/COMP205/LECTURES/ERROR/lec23/node...

They meant fixed precision not fixed point math.