Erlang has native big integer support and double-precision floating point support. For some scientific and financial applications, decimal precision is required.
$ ./rebar compile
==> erldecimal (compile)
Compiled src/decimal.erl
1> decimal:to_decimal("12")
{d,0,12,0}
2> decimal:to_list(decimal:mult(decimal:to_decimal("144"), decimal:to_decimal("0.1"))).
"14.4"