> there's no such thing as "decoding" IEEE754 to something else. Huh? You can totally take the raw bytes in an IEEE754 floating point number and parse them int

> there's no such thing as "decoding" IEEE754 to something else. Huh? You can totally take the raw bytes in an IEEE754 floating point number and parse them into something else (say, a decimal type) the same way you can take the raw bytes of a JSON document and parse it into a struct. It's a lossy encoding for reals.