OK, I think I can go along with that, oddly enough.

The recurring nines problem is something that I'd thought about before, and I've spent a lot of time working it over in my head today. I didn't like the conclusion I was coming to, which was that math on a real number with a necessarily infinite decimal is effectively impossible. It does make a certain sense to accept that, for all practical purposes, .999... = 1. I just balk at the notion that they're exactly equal.