From a 1998 interview with William Kahan, the “father” of IEEE-754 floating point (emphasis mine):
> My reasoning was based on the requirements of a mass market: A lot of code involving a little floating-point will be written by many people who have never attended my (nor anyone else's) numerical analysis classes. We had to enhance the likelihood that their programs would get correct results. At the same time we had to ensure that people who really are expert in floating-point could write portable software and prove that it worked, since so many of us would have to rely upon it. There were a lot of almost conflicting requirements on the way to a balanced design.
I imagine that the number of people writing code without having taken a numerical methods class has only increased since the late 1970s being talked about, or even in the two decades since that interview.
> My reasoning was based on the requirements of a mass market: A lot of code involving a little floating-point will be written by many people who have never attended my (nor anyone else's) numerical analysis classes. We had to enhance the likelihood that their programs would get correct results. At the same time we had to ensure that people who really are expert in floating-point could write portable software and prove that it worked, since so many of us would have to rely upon it. There were a lot of almost conflicting requirements on the way to a balanced design.
I imagine that the number of people writing code without having taken a numerical methods class has only increased since the late 1970s being talked about, or even in the two decades since that interview.