Obviously I'm referring to integer operations within a 52-bit or 23-bit range, not outside the ability of floating point representations to represent integers!

> What do you mean by

I mean exactly that sort of thing. Algorithms that, for example, divide a line into intervals, where empty intervals are not needed, or desired, and are generally risky with respect to the probability of having a correct implementation. An example of this would be computations of the area of a union of rectangles. You might make a segment tree -- and avoid having degenerate rectangles in your segment tree.