The semantics of floating point arithmetic in C do not allow the first line to be eliminated. It has non-trivial behavior in the case of signaling NaNs or denormals or -0.0.
It can if you set the DAZ (denormals are zero) flag on the Pentium. I don't know if the C & IEEE-754 standards require the optimizer to preserve semantics in that case, but I can see why compiler writers would stay clear of such an optimization.
Neither the C standard nor IEEE-754 specify anything about floating-point operations in non-standard modes like DAZ or FZ. (Nor do they require that support for signaling NaNs be implemented). The behavior of -0.0 suffices to block the optimization under strict fp modes, however.
