[Michael Hudson]
Does anyone (Tim?) have (ideally Python, but I can cope) code
implementing the fixed-format algorithm from the Subject: named paper
by Burger & Dybvig?
I don't, and you're too young if you think anyone else might <wink>.
The paper gives Scheme code, you know! And there's a Haskell variant here:
http://lml.ls.fi.upm.es/~jjmoreno/manual/haskell98-library-report/numeric.html
As the paper says at the end,
[David] Gay ... showed that floating-point arithmetic is sufficiently
accurate in most cases when the requested number of digits is small.
The fixed-format printing algorithm described in this paper is useful when
these heuristics fail.
IOW, the point of Burger & Dybvig was to run faster than the
algorithms in the earlier Steele & White paper, but David Gay's code
*usually* beats everything on speed (if you don't care about speed,
code for this task is quite simple; if you do care about speed, it's
mind-numbingly complicated), so there's little incentive to implement
this algorithm. Gay's code is written in C, & available from Netlib:
http://www.netlib.org/fp/