When people say “floating point numbers are weird”, they typically mean that the IEEE 754 floating point representation for numbers doesn’t meet their needs, or maybe that it meets their needs but it is surprising in its behaviour because it doesn’t match their intuitive understanding of how numbers work.
IEEE 754 isn’t weird, it’s just designed for a specific scenario. One where having lots of different representations of NaN makes sense, because they can carry information about what calculation led to NaN, so you shouldn’t do equality comparisons on NaN. One where having positive and negative representations of 0 makes sense. One where…you get the idea.
(What is that specific scenario? It’s one where developers need to represent real numbers, and need reliable error-signaling, and don’t necessarily understand the limitations well enough to design a good system or handle corner cases themselves. Once you’ve got an idea that IEEE 754 does something weird, you’ve probably graduated and are ready to move on.)
But you were sold a general-purpose programming language running on a general-purpose computer, and the only representations of numbers they support are actually not general purpose: fixed-width integers with optional 2s complement negatives, and IEEE 754 floating point. You don’t have to use those options, and you don’t have to feel like you must be holding it wrong because your supposedly general-purpose programming environment only lets you use specific types of numbers that don’t fit your purpose.
Check out decimal representations, arbitrary precision representations, posits, fractional representations, alternative rounding choices, and open up the possibility of general-purpose numbers in your general-purpose computer.
