Comment Engineer vs. Scientist (Score 1) 334
The difference is for Engineers versus Scientists.
Engineers, who I would argue are far more likely to use MATLAB, have 0 need (with 0 being less than eps) for 64-bit integers because you will never ever ever ever measure data with accuracy of 1 part in 9,007,199,254,740,992, or anywhere near that. And as a rule, we have no need for integers because measured data and functions of measured data are much better represented using floating point.
Scientists, who do work in absolutes, would have this need, but I would argue that they would not use MATLAB anyways and use something like Mathematica because it can do all calculations without losing any accuracy.