Answer from cs61c-ei (Jing Chen 16669246) for Question 1
Because of the fact that bit patterns have no inherent meaning and can represent integers, floats, characters, instructions, etc, much emphasis is placed on the instruction that operates on the bits in each word. The constraints, of course, are that computer numbers are finite. Thus, sacrifices must be made somewhere, specifically in the case of floating-point operations. One technique probably would be to add additional hardware to increase accuracy/range, but the cost to this would obviously be slower processing rate. (One of the key concepts to hardware design is to keep things small and simple.)