Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ideally, to maintain maximal correctness, it would be in a symbolic representation until an inexact rendering was called for, but simply resorting to floats for irrationals is not entirely unreasonable though it's still a premature optimization, but not as bad as resorting to it for rationals.
Maintaining symbolic values could quickly blow up. For example when using iterative methods. Are you aware of any languages doing symbolic representation with standard types? I don't see how irrationals as floats is premature optimization. If you already know symbolic representation is going to blow up quickly and cause downstream headaches the measures you take are not premature. Though now I do wonder how the heada…
It could, in certain circumstances.
> I don't see how irrationals as floats is premature optimization.
It is, when it is because “could” and not because “does”.
> If you already know symbolic representation is going to blow up quickly and cause downstream headaches the measures you take are not premature
Sure, if you know that's going to happen. When you do it because it might happen, or because it happens to be the language’s default representation of irrational (or even exact decimal, or in JS’s case exact integer) numbers, that's a different story.