I look forward to the day we can start using quad-precision numbers, but was disappointed to see that in the specification, only 15 bits out of a whopping 128 were assigned to the exponent as shown by Wikipedia. That's only 4 bits more than we had for doubles!
This allows for great precision, but we sacrifice the high number range. In my years of programming, I have always found extremely high numbers to be pretty useful for various calculations and purposes, and sometimes the 'double' doesn't cut the mustard. It also helps simplify many algorithms when we don't need to worry about number overflow.
I was just wondering if the seemingly heavy bias towards precision had a good reason. Are there practical purposes for such extreme precision?