The mutable global state problem is hard. And, its implications are woven throughout the spec. For example, pow(0, nan) is 0, not nan, because that's slightly m

The mutable global state problem is hard. And, its implications are woven throughout the spec. For example, pow(0, nan) is 0, not nan, because that's slightly more convenient in some cases, and it's assumed that you can always check the Invalid flag to see if any nans were produced and swallowed. At the same time though, it's not designed that way accidentally or in ignorance of the problems it creates. IEEE-754 knew that programming languages wouldn't be very happy about global state, and chose to keep it because they believed it was still the best approach. In many other areas, IEEE-754 pushed against people who said it would be too hard to implement, and in retrospect they ended up being right in many cases. It's tempting to wonder if global mutable state really was too much of a tradeoff though, in retrospect.