I think this likely has to do with how confusing the implementation of floats and doubles in programming languages has been over the years. A lot of languages w

I think this likely has to do with how confusing the implementation of floats and doubles in programming languages has been over the years. A lot of languages will call a double precision decimal a float, but I don't know of any languages that call a single precision decimal a double. I think the general ambiguity around float is why they chose to use it as any precision float.