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.

I think I would find it very challenging but fun. Certainly more fun than writing a date/time library (way more inconsistent cases; daylight savings time horrors; leap seconds; date jumps when moving from Julian to Gregorian) or a file system (also fun, I think, but thoroughly testing it scares me of)

I just wish there were a widespread decimal-based floating point standard & units.