[Cfp-interest] Floating-point extensions for C report - part 1 - local flags

[David Hough CFP]

> Do we need a general local flag mechanism

It might be a helpful programmer abstraction, but I don't think it would have
any efficiency value on typical current hardware.    The local flags would
be implemented in the same hardware register as the global flags have been,
so the real global flags would have to be maintained in a software location...
what about a code block that wanted to look at a local underflow flag and
a global invalid flag?

For that fraction of the C universe which is just wants a higher-level
machine-oriented programming language, I suppose the programmer's feature
would just be access to the single global flag register.

So my conclusion at the moment is to stick to the higher level alternate
exception handling idea and leave some kind of local flag as an 
implementation option.