I'm saying IEEE shouldn't have defined them that way, yes. It was an arbitrary choice. As to where, before negative infinity or after positive infinity; I don't really care which. But the fact that we can't have good things (e.g. a standards compliant std::set<float>) because of a standards committee punted on making that choice makes me sad :(
I do wonder why they didn't special-case std::less for floats. They already did it for pointers - operator< for pointers isn't even defined, much less a strict weak order, if the operands do not point to the same object (region of storage). This is in order to facilitate non-flat addressing schemes. std::less, however, is explicitly specified to work with any pair of pointers.
