I'm preparing for a class lesson (I'm teaching) and I'm trying to predict any possible questions from the students and I ran into one that I can't answer:
If we have floats, why do we ever use ints at all? What's the point?
I know (or at least I think) that floats take more memory because they have more accuracy, but surely the difference is nearly negligible as far as memory usage goes for most non-embedded applications.
And I realize in many cases we actually don't need a float, but honestly, why do we have ints in the first place? What's the point? There's nothing an int can do that a float can't.
So why are they there at all?
Edit: You could argue they're easier to write (3 vs. 3.0) but you could just make all numbers default to float, so 3 would be treated the same as 3.0. Why make it a different type?