Comment by marcosdumay

Well, manually floating the point in a string is sure to bite again and again too, but way more frequently than in binary.

There is actually no better way, if you try to calculate over the reals (with computers or whatever you want), you are prone to be bitten. Once in a while there's an article about intervalar algebra on HN, those are a great opportunity to just nod positively and remember all of the flaws of intervalar algebra I got to learn on my school's physics labs. (And yeah, those flaws do fit some problems better than FP, but not all.)