Infinite precision intermediate arithmetic: how much would break?

josh:

We have algebraic arithmetic methods on floats. We could have them on integers.

This is not the same thing. Algebraic methods on floats allows the implementation to return a number of possible values, depending on how the operations are rearranged. This proposal would make the final result a single value on all supported platforms.

(It would allow algebraic optimizations on the infinite-precision intermediate operations, but not such optimizations on floating point operations)