[victorstanciu]

You can use two integers, one that represents the entire number including decimals, and one that represents the precision, to know how many decimals are there. For example, you'd represent "123.45" as 12345 and 2. That's often how monetary amounts are stored in databases, to avoid a lot of common floating-point arithmetic pitfalls.

[thrance]

But that's just floats with extra steps? Floats have two parts in their binary representation: mantissa and exponent (and sign), which correspond exactly to your "entire number" and "precision", only in base 2 instead of 10.

[wavemode]

the difference being that with integers you never end up with rounding errors when doing addition subtraction or multiplication (only division)

[OJFord]

Or just '123' & '45'?

[zinekeller]

I think it is to optimize arithmetic operations. Significantly less steps with the first method, which only requires adjustment of how many digits are considered to be decimal rather than the rejoin, arithmetic, separate again for your proposal. Plus, wider float.

[noam_k]

But then you can't tell the difference between 0.12 and 0.00012.

Unless you're suggesting to use the strings "0" and "00012", at which point you could just use a byte string with the utf8 encoding of the value.