GoKawiilBlog Post Catalogs Software Alternatives to Binary Floating Point Math
A recent technical blog post surveys five software-based approaches for representing numbers beyond standard binary floating point, including decimal floating point (used in Python's decimal and Java's BigDecimal), fraction-based arithmetic, symbolic computation as in Mathematica or sympy, interval arithmetic, and binary-coded decimal. The author notes these methods are implemented purely in software, making them slower than native floating point, and that support varies widely across programming languages.