It seems very hard to pick a good 'number' (JS's is actually a double-precision 64-bit IEEE 754 float, which almost never feels right).
The SimpleLanguage tutorial language has a bigint style number scheme with efficient optimization:
https://github.com/graalvm/simplelanguage/blob/master/langua...
Python at least has the big num integers, but its "float" is just Rust's f64, the 64-bit machine integers again but wearing a funny hat, not even a decimal big num, and decimal isn't much better.
I see no reason why I would need to represent it as an accurate fraction instead of two numbers, even if I divide it later I can always just do that inaccurately since the exact aspect ratio doesn't matter for resizing images (<1% error won't affect the final result)
The bigger problem is precision. The right thing there, IMO, is to default to infinite (like Python does for ints but not floats), with the ability to constrain as needed. It is also obviously useful to be able to constrain the denominator to something like 10.
The internal representation really shouldn't matter that much in most actual applications. Let game devs and people who write ML code worry about 32-bit ints and 64-bit floats.
Note parent said "at least the reals"
- Leopold Kronecker