They are, just check anything fixed-point for the 486SX vs anything floating under a 486DX. It's faster scaling and sum and print the desired precision than operating on floats.

Is that also the case for modern architectures? Eg is there SIMD fixed precision?

I wonder... couldn't there just be some library type for this, e.g. `associative::float` and `associative::doube` and such (in C++ terms), so that compilers can ignore non-associativity for actions on values of these types? Or attributes one can place on variables to force assumption of associativity?