Hijacking this comment in case you (or someone from HN) knows. Is there any particular reason that AIFF uses an 80-bit extended float precision for the sample

Hijacking this comment in case you (or someone from HN) knows. Is there any particular reason that AIFF uses an 80-bit extended float precision for the sample rate, instead of a 32-bit integer like WAVE? I assume this was an oversight at the time, but I'm curious if there are actual applications where sub-Hz (or 2^32Hz) precision is needed.