Apologies to Nefario, I was reacting to the wiki pages written by genjix on how to use PHP with bitcoind that started with:
+ First, compile my fork.
+ Next, install the GMP and BCMath libraries...
And why do I defend floats: because simple things should be simple. Using GMP/BCMATH is overkill for 98% of what bitcoin JSON-RPC users will be doing.
And because certain people keep beating this dead horse. I have said that I am PERFECTLY WILLING to support strings in the JSON-RPC interface if somebody can demonstrate to me someplace where it is actually a real problem (that isn't trivially solved using something like round(value*1e8+0.5) or printf("%.08", value)).