Havoc, I’m not
worried about bitwise equality, and in fact it is not what I want to
test. I know that floating point representations are non-unique (one
can shift the mantissa right and increment the exponent to get the
exact same floating point number…). I’m merely worried about
whether i+a and i, as floating point values (i.e. after roundoff), are
considered unequal (and, if so, whether (i+a)-i is positive). The
compiler is apparently doing optimizations, because it reports that
(i+a) > i is true, but that double_comparison(i+a,i) is false. It
seems to be either not rounding the i+a before subtracting the i
(which I believe is possible with special floating point instructions
that use extended precision and is something that I might assume would
come from -ffast-math), or else making incorrect rearrangements by
assuming the associativity property holds.