Fair point. I've edited my comment to include the word "unsigned".

> I'd argue that whoever understands the ring of integers modulo 2^64, will also understand the IEEE754 semantics

I'm an existence proof that that is not true :). Although I'm sure I could learn the IEEE754 semantics if I put enough effort into reading the spec.

But even if they don't know the word "ring", I think most programmers do understand how modulo arithmetic works, and they have algebraic intuitions about it that turn out to be true: both operations are commutative and associative, multiplication distributes over addition, equality of a forumla involving * and + is true if it's true in the actual integers, and so on.