assignments and casts don't clip extra precision, if any. The
implementation is to assign to a temporary volatile variable and read
the result back to assign to the original lvalue.
lib/msun currently 2 different hard-coded hacks to avoid the problem
in just a few places and needs it in a few more places. One variant
uses volatile for the original lvalue. This works but is slower than
necessary. Another temporarily casts the lvalue to volatile. This
broke with gcc-4.2.1 or earlier (gcc now stores to the lvalue but
doesn't load from it).