[glkindlmann]

Forgive them. That kind of educational failure is common: floating point is just not covered in basic intro classes, or covered hurriedly. There are enough subtleties to how floating point code works that even when an elective class covers it, it is still peripheral to the focus of the class (e.g. intro computer graphics). So students can get by without really coming to terms with the ubiquity of rounding error, or the relationship between denormalized and normalized values. Understanding those fundamentals is a pre-req to understanding how corners are being cut with fast-math.

[bsenftner]

This is not an issue of floating point math, it's a basic understanding that nothing comes without a cost. If there is a "faster anything" switch, that is at the cost of something else, and it is our entire professional integrity to understand that relationship, and then investigate what is being compromised by that "optimization". Anything less, that's not engineering.