I don't understand all the crap that IEEE 754 gets. I appreciate that it may be surprising that 0.1 + 0.2 != 0.3 at first, or that many people are not educated about floating point, but I don't understand the people who "understand" floating point and continue to criticize it for the 0.1 + 0.2 "problem."
The fact is that IEEE 754 is an exceptionally good way to approximate the reals in computers with a minimum number of problems or surprises. People who don't appreciate this should try to do math in fixed point to gain some insight into how little you have to think about doing math in floating point.
This isn't to say there aren't issues with IEEE 754 - of course there are. Catastrophic cancellation and friends are not fun, and there are some criticisms to be made with how FP exceptions are usually exposed, but these are pretty small problems considering the problem is to fit the reals into 64/32/16 bits and have fast math.
The fact is that IEEE 754 is an exceptionally good way to approximate the reals in computers with a minimum number of problems or surprises. People who don't appreciate this should try to do math in fixed point to gain some insight into how little you have to think about doing math in floating point.
This isn't to say there aren't issues with IEEE 754 - of course there are. Catastrophic cancellation and friends are not fun, and there are some criticisms to be made with how FP exceptions are usually exposed, but these are pretty small problems considering the problem is to fit the reals into 64/32/16 bits and have fast math.