[wolf550e]

The performance of decimal arithmetic on hardware not recently made by IBM means it cannot be used in most places.

[maxlybbert]

The original post said he'd be happy to trade performance for consistency.

He could also use fdlibm ( http://netlib.org/fdlibm/index.html ), at least for anything other than primitive operations. But, again, it trades performance for consistency.

[maxlybbert]

This week I learned that C99 and C11 have an FP_CONTRACT pragma, that can be set "off" for this reason ( http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n1570.pdf , section 6.5, paragraph 8).