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Why not? Because of interop with other libs/tools? It's not _that_ hard, but I can see the problem if whole workflow isn't like that.

You know a cool thing you can do to help fixed point interop between operations in a complex system where you absolutely don't want to accidentally overflow anywhere? You can tack on some bits to the number to control an overall scale of the fixed point number. Let's call it an exponent ;)

Agreed. Let's standardize it :))

The person you're responding to probably worked with DSP chips, which are generally not floating-point. e.g. Motorola 56000, TigerSHARC, Blackfin.

most of it was FPGA work but in some cases DSP processors. Even when you have floating point support it is much slower than if you use fixed point. As for MATLAB, modeled plenty of filters in it for fixed-point math.