The floating-point environment provided by the Oracle Developer Studiocompilers and the Oracle Solaris OS on SPARC-based systems and x86-based systems supports all of the exception handling facilities required by the IEEE standard as well as many of the recommended optional facilities. One objective of these facilities is explained in the IEEE 754 Standard (IEEE 854, page 18) as follows:
... to minimize for users the complications arising from exceptional conditions. The arithmetic system is intended to continue to function on a computation as long as possible, handling unusual situations with reasonable default responses, including setting appropriate flags.
To achieve this objective, the standards specify default results for exceptional operations and require that an implementation provide status flags, which can be sensed, set, or cleared by a user, to indicate that exceptions have occurred. The standards also recommend that an implementation provide a means for a program to trap (i.e., interrupt normal control flow) when an exception occurs. The program can optionally supply a trap handler that handles the exception in an appropriate manner, for example by providing an alternate result for the exceptional operation and resuming execution. The following sections describe in more detail about how the features of the floating-point environment supports these exceptions.