gcc did not always drop excess precision according to c99 at assignments
before version 4.5 even if -std=c99 was requested which caused badly
broken mathematical functions on i386 when FLT_EVAL_METHOD!=0

but STRICT_ASSIGN was not used consistently and it is worked around for
old compilers with -ffloat-store so it is no longer needed

the new convention is to get the compiler respect c99 semantics and when
excess precision is not harmful use float_t or double_t or to specialize
code using FLT_EVAL_METHOD