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by sfoley 220 days ago
Near the end of the article, under Motivation:

> The BASIC language eliminated much of the complexity of FORTRAN by having a single number type. This simplified the programming model and avoided a class of errors caused by selection of the wrong type. The efficiencies that could have gained from having numerous number types proved to be insignificant.

DEC64 was specifically designed to be the only number type a language uses (not saying I agree, just explaining the rationale).