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SilasBarta comments on General Bitcoin discussion thread (May 2011) - Less Wrong
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But certainly all of these components can do floating point arithmetic, even if it requires special programming. People could use computers to add decimals before floating-point specialized subsystems existed. And you wouldn't say that an abacus can't handle floating point arithmetic "because it has no mechanism to split the beads".
In this case, the emulation would be going the other way - using floating point to emulate integer arithmetic. This can probably be done, but it'd be dramatically less efficient than regular integer arithmetic. (Note that "arithmetic" in this case means mainly bitwise rotation, AND, OR, and XOR).