std::pow implementation

[Gabriel Dos Reis]

Richard Guenther <rguenth@tat.physik.uni-tuebingen.de> writes:

|                                          At some point the user _will_
| know better - why do you think we have __attribute__((always_inline)) and
| __attribute__((noinline))?

We got __attribute__((always_inline)) because it was decided that the
compiler knows better than the programmer and the obvious syntax
"inline" should be a comment.  Then people reinvented "inline" with a
different syntax. 

| Why do we have means to control the inlining
| heuristics at all? Do you expect us to arrive to a point where all these
| are unnecessary?

If I think "inline" should be void of semantics, I would not have
written the lines above.

-- Gaby