Hello, There appears to be extremely minimal documentation on how floats are formatted on output. All I really see is that float.__str__() is float.__repr__(). So that means that float->str->float does not result in a different value.
It would be nice if the output format for float was documented, to the extent this is possible. #python suggested that I propose a patch, but I see no way to write a documentation patch without having any clue about what Python promises, whether in the CPython implementation or as part of a specification for Python. What are the promises Python makes about the str() of a float? Will it produce 1.0 today and 1.0e0 or +1.0 tomorrow? When is the result in exponential notation and when not? Does any of this depend on the underlying OS or hardware or Python implementation? Etc. I'm guessing that Python is consistent with an IEEE 754 "external character sequence", but don't know what the IEEE specification says or whether python conforms. I don't really care whether there's documentation for __str__() or __repr__() or something else. I'm just thinking that there should be some way to guarantee a well defined "useful" float output formatting. By "useful" I mean in exponential notation when non-exponential notation is over-long. I am writing a program that sometimes prints python floats and want to be able to document what is printed. Right now I can't truly guarantee anything, other than the nan and inf and -inf representations. (I feel comfortable with nan and the like because I don't see it likely that their representations will change.) Of course I could always re-implement Python's float.__repr__() in Python so as to have full control, but this should be pointless. Python's output representation is unlikely to change and Python should be able to make sufficient promises about its existing float representation. I suppose there are similar issues with integers, but the varieties of floating point number implementations and the existence of both exponential and non-exponential representations make float particularly problematic and representations potentially mercurial. I also don't know if documentation changes with regard to external representations would require a PEP. I have found the following related information: Use shorter float repr when possible https://bugs.python.org/issue1580 https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Python/pystrtod.c#L831 String conversion and formatting https://docs.python.org/3/c-api/conversion.html sys.float_repr_style https://docs.python.org/3/library/sys.html#sys.float_repr_style object.__str__(self) https://docs.python.org/3/reference/datamodel.html#object.__str__ At the end of the day I don't _really_ care. But having put thought into the matter I care enough to write this email and ask the question. Regards, Karl <k...@karlpinc.com> Free Software: "You don't pay back, you pay forward." -- Robert A. Heinlein _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list -- python-dev@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-dev-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-dev.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/message/FV22TKT3S2Q3P7PNN6MCXI6IX3HRRNAL/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
