“Die ganzen Zahlen hat der liebe Gott gemacht, alles andere ist Menschenwerk”

Translation: “God made natural numbers; all else is the work of man. “

Leopold Kronecker, German Mathematician

Some of the software I have worked on over the years declare no real numbers, meeting the requirements with unsigned integers only.  I like integers because of their elegance and simplicity.

But when you need floating point numbers, here is an excellent explanation of the IEEE standard for floating point numbers: