[msandford]

Because having the hardware throw exceptions all over the place can get INCREDIBLY tedious if you want to ignore them and solider on. It means having "try/catch" around every single arithmetic operation everywhere. So it's tons of extra code and it might slow things down 100%-500% or more.

What if you're doing some kind of matrix math and you just need the results of the diagonal and a single NaN creeps in somewhere but doesn't destroy your matrix. Would you accept your program needing 50% more LOC and taking 4x as long for this result?