Maybe that is not "architecture" or "technique" but is is definitely not trivial and is important in almost any context -- but also probably not what you were going for.
This sounds interesting, how do you mean? To me it seems like context is perhaps the key element that we should concern ourselves with to further the engineering or scientific aspect of programming.
Let's say we're deciding between floating point arithmetics, fixed decimal numbers, or rational numbers. All three of which are very well-established and useful solutions to the problem of subdividing integers. We have some context already here, and we'll need to provide a bit more context to know which solution to choose. Would you agree with that?