Since the function of old retired persons is to tell youngsters stories around the campfile:
A supercomputer hardware designer told me that when forced to add IEEE arithmetic to his designs that it decreased performance substantially, maybe 25-30%; it wasn't that doing the operations took so much longer, it was that the increased physical space needed for that circuitry pushed the memory farther away. Doubtless this inspired doing some of it in software instead.
No standard for controlling the behaviors exists, either, so you can find out the hard way that underflow-to-zero is being done in software by default, and that you are doing a lot of it. Or that your code doesn't have the same behavior on different platforms.
To my mind, all that was really accomplished was to convince said youngsters that somehow this NaN stuff was the solution to some problem. In reality, computing for 3 days and having it print out 1000 NaNs is not exactly satisfying. I think this stuff was essentially a mistake in the sense that it is a nice ivory-tower idea that costs more in practice than it is worth. I do not think a properly thought-out and coded algorithm ought to do anything that this stuff is supposed to 'help' with, and if it does do it, the code should stop executing.
Anyway, if I thought it would do the job I wouldn't have written MA in the first place.
Rant off. Nap. Grumble. Stupid kids. (:->
-- Paul
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