Wow, most people ask here for adding a feature, but you're the only one so far who asked for removing a feature.
That is not true, several people asked for it. Interestingly, I bought some days ago for nostalgic reasons the "Gamestudio 3D" book and I noticed, that the "var" type was used 'til then.
Since interactive graphics demand speed and floating point is not usually the fastest kind of arithmetic available on personal computers, fixed point arithmetic is a valid alternative, because it uses ordinary integer operations. That was cool back in the nineties, because almost all consoles like SNES, Sega Megadrive and the Gameboy didn't had floating point units (FPUs); even on the PC fixed point values were popular in games like Doom because it improved performance. Still today fixed point arithmetics are used on most low-cost embedded microprocessors and microcontrollers, that also still don't have a FPU.
That is also true for many lower-end Android devices, that is why e.g. the OpenGL ES standard supports fixed point arithmetic side by side with floating point arithmetic, too. But even though you use float's, vertices are always stored in fixed point format. On the other hand, all iOS devices come with FPUs, so, it would be a waste to use fixed point arithmetic there, because internally, all fixed point values are converted to 32bit floats for all arithmetic operations, as far as I know. And if you know, for instance, that your Android device has a FPU, it would be also not very clever to use only fixed points (with the exception for vertices).
From a convenience point of view, I vote also for replacing the fixed point "var" type with e.g. floating points; especially to overcome the +/- 99999.999 limit and to model values beneath 0.001. I also - literally - HATE doing conversions all the time.
But I can totally understand, why JCL would stick to fixed point arithmetic. If he would replace them, I guess the first candidate were floats just because of the same byte-size (4). I also don't know if this would be a hit on the overall performance; I don't know what tricks are used by JCL to increase performance (if any?), but I doubt that there would be a speed-hit on Desktop PCs.
