Hopefully it still works as an attribute but my point is that you can (say) opt in to allowing more liberal use of FMA without (say) opting in to aggressive NaN assumptions
GCC attributes give you per-function control over both target and optimization options (unfortunately not with Fortran). I'd have to look up what's available, but some per-loop control is possible with OpenMP pragmas too (perhaps with GCC's -fopenmp-simd if you don't want the threading).