Originally posted by sonhouse
Well you can borrow my Hexiry computer, it has 6 states, so it can hold both 1/3 and 1/2 exactly at the same time. Its a Hewlett Packardd X10000ZEL upgrade with the Hexiry CPU, it also has 10 terabytes of 6 port ram operating at one picosecond access time so its pretty fast too.....
except that all commercial CPU's operate in binary at the lowest level of abstraction. it's possible to represent ternary or hexary states in binary, just like it's possible to represent decimal.
as said before, you can represent all rational numbers as a numerator and denominator using integers.
If you want to do something like pi * 1/pi, it's quite easy to represent pi as a symbol (just like I did here), and program the computer to cancel the pi in the numerator with the pi in the denominator.
In fact you can represent any distinct real number as a symbol and use it with exact precision, just so long as your result has the same symbol or it cancels in some way.
It's when you start doing things more complicated than algebra, or if you try to represent your real number in decimal/binary/ternary/whatever that you start to run into problems with precision.