I was going to say "well, you've still got NaR", but apparently that's been defined to sort less than all other posits? Huh, OK.

yeah. having a total order just makes everything so much nicer. total order is one of the defining properties of the reals, and realistically if the user calls sort (or puts one in a B-tree), you have to put the NaNs at one side or the other (unless you're C/C++ and allow that to launch the nukes)