>>10495011Why is rational and irrational a useful distinction? Take a look at numerical analysis. There's plenty of practical, down-to-earth reasons.
People forget that computers are merely configurations of matter energy, designed to extract entropy from the Universe and channel it toward useful computation--that the only reason they work in the first place is because the Universe itself is at least Turing complete. And in computing, there's no such thing as infinity or infinitesimals in an absolute sense. Mathematica, for example, uses all of the same heuristics, hacks and rules that mathematicians learn to work around them.
