[cycomanic]

Interesting, I stand corrected. In most of the fields I'm aware off one could easily work in 32bit without any issues.

I find the robotics example quite surprising in particular. I think the precision of most input sensors is less than 16bit so. If your inputs have this much noise on them how come you need so much precision your calculations?

[spookie]

The precision isn't uniform across a range of possible inputs. This means you need a higher bit depth, even though "you aren't really using it", just so you can establish a good base precision you are sure you are hitting at every range. The part where you are saying "most sensors" is doing a lot of leverage here.