Re: Proposal: New Eq and Ord instances for Double and Float

Bryan O'Sullivan writes:

I am strongly against this proposal, as it is in an area that is particularly poorly understood by most programmers (even experts).

Whilst Johan Tibell writes:

I prefer to stick with IEEE which is well understood and standardized.

So which is it? Are these standards well-understood or not? I would argue that the unexpected and unintuitive behaviour of IEEE floats trip up many programmers. (But that does not necessarily mean that the proposal is going to help.) For myself, I would prefer NaNs to compare equal. But if we are suggesting a departure from IEEE, then maybe an even better solution would be to make NaNs exceptions instead of values? Regards, Malcolm