It is a shame we tend to teach floats as the computer version of reals. Thinking of them as "scientific numbers" really helps a ton with this.

... but people are in the habit of using doubles. Many languages, like Javascript, only support doubles and int32(s) do embed in doubles.

I have some notes for a fantasy computer which is maybe what would have happened if Chinese people [1] evolved something like the PDP-10 [2] Initially I was wanting a 24-bit wordsize [3] but decided on 48-bit [4] because you can fit 48 bits into a double for a Javascript implementation.

[1] There are instructions to scan UTF-8 characters and the display system supports double-wide bitmap characters that are split into halves that are indexed with 24-bit ints.

[2] It's a load-store architecture but there are instructions to fetch and write 0<n<48 bits out of a word even overlapping two words, which makes [1] possible; maybe that write part is a little unphysical

[3] I can't get over how a possible 24-bit generation didn't quite materialize in the 1980s, and find the eZ80 evokes a kind of nostalgia for an alternate history

[4] In the backstory, it started with a 24-bit address space like the 360 but got extended to have "wide pointers" qualified by an address space identifier (instead of the paging-oriented architecture the industry) really took as well as "deep pointers" which specify a bitmap, 48-bit is enough for a pointer to be deep and wide and have some tag bits. Address spaces can merge together contiguously or not depending on what you put in the address space table.