It shouldn't though
Why not? Operators have different precedence to their real-world counterparts too; unlike C, calculations return the faster type unless you specify otherwise... not all computational standards are necessarily equal. Blitz is mostly used for games, not scientific simulations - keeping floating point error in check in this manner is totally acceptable for a game-oriented language. There's nothing to stop you rolling your own function to behave in the traditional manner if that's what you want.