Just a thought:
Do you really want to use floating point numbers or
are your really looking at fixed point integers.
For example if you are dealing with length to the nearest 10th of an inch,
store your length in 10ths of an inch (i.e. 12.3 inches is stored as the integer 123 ) .
Floating point numbers are hugely slow and awkward.
A little more info about your application would be helpful.