My feeling is that there is more to 'counting' and to the 'number exhibited' than merely its value. There is: a) the implied precision - which our various examples show can be overstated, b) the suggestion that the number could have been different: so, saying a chess-player has 7.5 points in a tournament suggests it might be 7.6 (not true btw) - '7½' is better c) the assurance that the number is correct: as an offshore yacht navigator, I would always right '01' rather than '1' to underline that we are genuinely looking at a 'one' The adjacent subject of units is also of interest. At least one space-mission tripped over this. A colleague suggested 'the unit' should be in the data-type definition at runtime so that, e.g., cm cannot be added to inches. Guy