That failure had nothing to do with floating point specifically. The same failure could have occurred when converting any data type with larger range (including

That failure had nothing to do with floating point specifically. The same failure could have occurred when converting any data type with larger range (including rationals or arbitrary precision numbers) to 16 bit integer. I would say the fact that floats can have data larger than INT16_MAX is hardly a surprise. That was just a bug, not some great and surprising drawback of floating point.