What has always annoyed me is that the spec never says, AFAIK, if the 23rd bit should be ON vs OFF for a signalling vs quiet NaN, which means that you can't portably set a value to a quiet NaN at compile-time.
SGI/Irix machines in the 2000s, for example, had perfectly good floating point but had the 23rd being OFF for a quiet NaN, while other machines have it ON for quiet NaN. And this is independent of endien-ness: these SGIs were big endien just like other big-endian machines that made quiet NaN differently.
SGI/Irix machines in the 2000s, for example, had perfectly good floating point but had the 23rd being OFF for a quiet NaN, while other machines have it ON for quiet NaN. And this is independent of endien-ness: these SGIs were big endien just like other big-endian machines that made quiet NaN differently.