All floating point operations take place in special 80-bit registers. Since this is the only way such numbers can be used it seems reasonable for BlitzMax to load the number into a register as it moves the value in memory.
If you had an application which needed to move large amounts of floating point numbers, without doing any operations on them, then it would make sense to do the kind of floatless read/write that you suggested. There aren't many such applications. Notice that sorting is not one them as the numbers must be loaded into registers in order to compare them.
If you had an application which needed to move large amounts of floating point numbers, without doing any operations on them, then it would make sense to do the kind of floatless read/write that you suggested. There aren't many such applications. Notice that sorting is not one them as the numbers must be loaded into registers in order to compare them.