It was pointed out to me that the precise issue came up before in the libraries list in January 2011 as well: http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/libraries/2011-January/015761.html

From the archives; it appears that proposal didn't generate much discussion either. I think everyone is agreed on the currently non-compliant behavior should be changed, but there just isn't enough number of people who care about it to make it actually happen. I'll follow up on the libraries list to freshen-up that proposal; if interested please post there.

Thanks,

-Levent.

On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 5:11 PM, Richard A. O'Keefe <ok@cs.otago.ac.nz> wrote:

On 8/04/2013, at 11:21 AM, Levent Erkok wrote:
> It appears that the consensus is that this is a historical definition dating back to the times when IEEE754 itself wasn't quite clear on the topic itself, and "so nobody thought that hard about negative zeroes." (The quote is from a comment from Lennart.)

I would expect abs(f) to be identical to copysign(f, 1.0).