We can see that this representation of numbers is designed to be extremely frugal with system memory, yet now having 6gb on a laptop is somewhat normal. Given the obviously deeply flawed nature of this system of number representation, the real question should be, "Where do we go from here?" Personally, I would like to see a native replacement called for, I think we have had enough of the Java-style solution requiring libraries to deal with numbers accurately. Is there anything on the horizon?
CPU registers and on-die caches are still expensive. That, and we still haven't figured out a numerical system that can do calculations as fast as binary floating points.
