Don wrote:
<snip>
Floating point settings are just another case of the same thing,
except that currently violations in relation to the former are allowed.
There's a fundamental difference between them: the floating point
settings are a hardware feature and it is IMPOSSIBLE to avoid them.
Actually, you _can_ avoid changing the floating point settings in the
course of an average program. But still....
You can choose not to use locale settings. Or, you can pass them as a
parameter, which doesn't work for floating point settings.
As long as it's the built-in arithmetic operators you're concerned
about. But that said, wrapping every arithmetic operation in a function
to purify it of dependence on floating point settings wouldn't be ideal.
Please do not get sidetracked on pure functions, it is orthogonal to
this issue.
I'm not sure about this. ISTM arithmetic operators are essentially pure
functions, and so the compiler may treat them as such.
Stewart.
