Speaking of IEEE 754, this morning I read the paper "How Java's Floating Point Hurts Everyone Everywhere". They take a pretty vituperative view of Java's inaccurate floating point arithmetic being passed off as proper 754. I agree; Sun ignored their whole army of numerical experts (who've implemented 754 in both hardware and software) in building Java and it shows everytime I want to catch a 754 Exception (not the same as a Java exception) but end up having to write tons of spaghetti code to "guarantee" that I wouldn't have to trap any of the 754 Exceptions.

This paper's an interesting read.