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And anyone implementing numerical algorithms is thankful for the tremendous amount of thought put into the fp spec. The complexity is worth it and makes the code much safer.

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There was actually no "thought" being put into the IEEE spec as such. It was merely a codification of the design of the Intel FPU (only one of many, very different implementations of FP units pre-standardisation). There was thought put into that implementation, but the "standard" is merely a codification of that design.

It has many many warts, and many design choices were made given the constraints of hardware of that time, not by considerations in terms of a standard.

William Kahan would beg to differ on this.

https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/ieee754status/754st...

he would, but he very much designed the standard around the idea that if you wanted to implement a floating point algorithm you would hire him.

imo they were wrong almost as much as they were right. -0.0, the plethora of NaNs, and having separate Inf and NaN all make the life of people writing algorithms a lot more annoying for very little benefit.

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