Re: [math-fun] when and why was it agreed that 0.999...=1?

Along this same vein of limits, I have never quite understood the staircase paradox, that a sequence of staircases from (0,0) to (1,1) with decreasing step size pointwise approaches a diagonal line of length sqrt(2), but the staircases themselves always have length 2. Anyway, I was wondering, does 0.99999... = 1 in the surreal numbers?