Mark Dickinson wrote:
I'd like to propose two minor changes to float and complex
formatting, for 3.1. I don't think either change should prove
particularly disruptive.
(1) Currently, '%f' formatting automatically changes to '%g' formatting for
numbers larger than 1e50. For example:
...
I propose removing this feature for 3.1
I'm +1 on this.
I have a suspicion that at least part of the
motivation for the '%f' -> '%g' switch is that it means the
implementation can use a fixed-size buffer. But Eric has
fixed this (in 3.1, at least) and the buffer is now dynamically
allocated, so this isn't a concern any more.
I agree that this is a big part of the reason it was done. There's still
some work to be done in the fallback code which we use if we can't use
Gay's implementation of _Py_dg_dtoa. But it's reasonably easy to
calculate the maximum buffer size needed given the precision, for
passing on to PyOS_snprintf. (At least I think that sentence is true,
I'll very with Mark offline).
Other reasons not to switch from '%f' to '%g' in this way:
- the change isn't gentle: as you go over the 1e50 boundary,
the number of significant digits produced suddenly changes
from 56 to 6; it would make more sense to me if it
stayed fixed at 56 sig digits for numbers larger than 1e50.
This is the big reason for me.
- float formatting is already quite complicated enough; no
need to add to the mental complexity
And this, too.
(2) complex str and repr don't behave like float str and repr, in that
the float version always adds a trailing '.0' (unless there's an
exponent), but the complex version doesn't:
...
I propose changing the complex str and repr to behave like the
float version. That is, repr(4. + 10.j) should be "(4.0 + 10.0j)"
rather than "(4+10j)".
I'm +0.5 on this. I'd probably be +1 if I were a big complex user. Also,
I'm not sure about the spaces around the sign. If we do want the spaces
there, we can get rid of Py_DTSF_SIGN, since that's the only place it's
used and we won't be able to use it for complex going forward.
Eric.
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