Programming Language Features

The IEEE standard says nothing about how the features can be accessed from a programming language. There is usually a mismatch between IEEE-supporting hardware and programming languages. Some capabilities, like exactly rounded square root, can be accessed through a library of function calls. Others are harder:

• The standard requires extended precision, while most languages define only single and double.
• Languages need to provide subroutines for reading and writing the state (exception flags, enable bits, rounding mode bits, etc).
• Cannot define since this is not true for ;
• are unordered, therefore when comparing 2 numbers we have .
• The precisely defined IEEE rounding modes may conflict with the programming language's implicitly-defined rounding modes or primitives.