Andrzej Krzemienski wrote:
Hashing and equality aside, do users need to know which cohort-member is used for representation while formatting the value? Why would you like to know this?
The decarith ("decimal arithmetic specification"), at https://speleotrove.com/decimal/, discusses this in Appendix B "Design concepts":
For example, people expect trailing zeros to be indicated conventionally in a result: the sum 1.57 + 2.03 is expected to result in 3.60, not 3.6; however, if the positional information has been lost during the operation it is no longer possible to show the expected result. For some applications the loss of trailing zeros is materially significant.
IEEE 754 also requires this (IEEE 754-2019, Clause 5.12.2). My own use case is debugging. Regards, Michel