[GHC] #9277: audit ghc floating point support for IEEE (non)compliance

[GHC]

#9277: audit ghc floating point support for IEEE (non)compliance
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       Reporter:  carter            |             Owner:  carter
           Type:  task              |            Status:  new
       Priority:  high              |         Milestone:  7.10.1
      Component:  Compiler          |           Version:  7.8.2
       Keywords:                    |  Operating System:  Unknown/Multiple
   Architecture:  Unknown/Multiple  |   Type of failure:  None/Unknown
     Difficulty:  Unknown           |         Test Case:
     Blocked By:                    |          Blocking:
Related Tickets:                    |
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 As best I can determine, ghc has never been closely audited for
 conformance to IEEE-754 (floating point) standard and currently is a bit
 far from providing a compliant implementation.

 This impacts both a number of other tasks i wish to do for ghc **and**
 much of my own use of haskell is in a floating point heavy workloads, I
 will do a bit of leg work to:

   a) improve test suite support for checking for compliance
   b) write some patches to provide portable compliant primops for the
 operations which need compiler support
   c) try to determine how to allow ghc optimizer to be a bit more
 aggressive in a sound way in the presence of floating point.

 (this may grow into a few subtickets, we'll see)

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Ticket URL: <http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/9277>
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