Borneo is a dialect of the Java language designed to have true support for the IEEE 754 floating point standard. Java’s specification creates several problems for numerical computation. Only a proper subset of IEEE 754’s required features are supported by Java; useful IEEE 754 features are either explicitly forbidden or omitted from the Java specification. Java does not allow use of the IEEE 754 recommended double extended format on the x86. Using the double extended format often protects simple numerical formulas from floating point anomalies. Strict adherence to Java’s floating point semantics leads to significant performance penalties on popular architectures, including both the x86 and PowerPC. To address these problems, the Borneo language changes and extends Java so that all IEEE 754 features can be expressed and so that new numeric types can be easily created.