> Seems like a design flaw in BASIC. Since FP numbers cannot exactly represent > all numbers that can be written in decimal (unless it's some kind of BCD > format), it really should be keeping those FP numbers stored in a decimal or > string format.
It gains a massive performance improvement by not doing so. There are always tradeoffs. Classic BASIC is clobbered on performance by a bunch of things but all the string to float parsing is one of them. It's possible to store both of course: Sinclair BASIC did exactly that on their Z80 based home computers but that makes the program larger.
