exponents (base 2) near 16383 were broken due to (1) wrong cutoff, and
(2) inability to fit the necessary range of scalings into a long
double value.

as a solution, we fall back to using frndint/fscale for insanely large
exponents, and also have to special-case infinities here to avoid
inf-inf generating nan.

thankfully the costly code never runs in normal usage cases.