> IEEE floating point is deterministic, to the apparent contradiction of many sentences written by Gustafson How can that be? The IEEE standard does not place

> IEEE floating point is deterministic, to the apparent contradiction of many sentences written by Gustafson How can that be? The IEEE standard does not place many requirements on the precision of the transcendental functions, and AFAICT a transcendental doesn't even need to return the exact same answer twice. That is, it is correct for a compiler to, if it can, evaluate a transcendental at compile-time with infinite precision, and if it cannot, call a run-time function that computes it. Math libraries can be dynamically linked, and all can produce different results here, so it is not that a compiler can go out of its way to make things deterministic either.