Kahan's Floating Point Test

[Stephen L Moshier]

> My questions is: Why isn't there a switch like
> -mieee754-compliant-code-no-matter-how-slow-it-is-on-this-buggy-x86-fpu

In a word, because there is no market for it.  There is no market for
many of the IEEE 754 provisions.  The points about floating point that
are really vital have long since been taken care of by people who
felt the items were so important that they were willing to spend time
or money on those features.  The remainder, putting it bluntly, are
not useful enough to spend time or money on (but you are of course
welcome to do so if you want!).  This benign neglect policy has been
going on in the industry for 15 years.  IEEE is not a new standard.

The newer C99 standard includes pragmas and support to elaborate the
IEEE flags.  I started a GCC implementation of them, posted some
patches and a plea for comments a year and a half ago, and there was
so little interest that I dropped the subject.  The search engine
indicates there has been no mention since then on the GCC mailing
lists of any activity to implement the C99 pragmas.