title: Why does JavaScript use base 10 floating point numbers (according to w3schools)?
body: <p>I read this <a href="http://www.w3schools.com/js/js_obj_number.asp" rel="nofollow">on W3Schools</a>:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>All numbers in JavaScript are stored as 64-bit (8-bytes) base 10,
    floating point numbers.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>This sounds quite strange. Now, it's either wrong or there should be a good reason not to use base 2 like the IEEE standard.</p>
  
  <p>I tried to find a real JavaScript definition, but I couldn't find any. Either on the V8 or WebKit documentation, the two JavaScript implementation I could find on Wikipedia that sounded the most familiar to me, I could find how they stored the JavaScript Number type.</p>
  
  <p>So, does JavaScript use base 10? If so, why? The only reason I could come up with was that maybe using base 10 has an advantage when you want to be able to accurately store integers as well as floating point numbers, but I don't know how using base 10 would have an advantage for that myself.</p>