My argument for having them on by default is that, if your computation
doesn't trap, that means it didn't overflow or underflow or something like
that. For a naive user, who expects FP numbers to "just work" (that IS
naive!) it's a great big flag that what they are doing is wrong.

But I don't feel very strongly about this.

On Sun, Oct 21, 2018 at 12:26 AM Taylor R Campbell <campb...@mumble.net>
wrote:

> I spend way too much time fighting with floating-point traps when I
> practically never want them on by default, particularly when trying to
> print (e.g.) subnormals at the REPL.
>
> Does anyone care that they're on by default?  Can we disable them?
> One can always detect them, or explicitly trap, in particular
> computations anyway.
>
> It would also be nice if, e.g., (exp -1000.) gave 0. and set the
> inexact-result exception bit, rather than barfing -- that's something
> the ucode does explicitly which the floating-point trap control has no
> power over.
>
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