On Thu, Jan 1, 2009 at 6:43 PM, Eric Smith <eric@trueblade.com> wrote:

David Cournapeau wrote:

...

Hi,

In python 2.6, there have been some effort to make float formatting more consistent between platforms, which is nice. Unfortunately, there is still one corner case, for example on windows:

print a -> print 'inf' print '%f' % a -> print '1.#INF'

The difference being that in the second case, the formatting is done in floatformat.c (in stringobject.c), whereas in the first case, it is done in format_float (in floatobject.c). Shouldn't both functions be calling the same underlying implementation, to avoid those inconsistencies ?

Yes, float formatting definitely needs some rationalization.

While this isn't the exact issue discussed in http://bugs.python.org/issue3382, it is related, and Windows is the reason I had to back my fix out right before the freeze for 2.6 and 3.0. It's on my list of things to fix.

http://bugs.python.org/issue4482 might also be related, and I'll fix that, too.

If you could either add a comment to 3382 (with this test case) or open another bug and assign it to me (eric.smith), I'd appreciate it.

I did open a new bug, with a first not-so-good patch at http://bugs.python.org/issue4799 I am not so familiar with python core code organization: where should a function used by several core objects (here floatobjects.c and stringobject.c, and potentially complexobject.c as well later) go ? Since the float_format is private, is it OK to change its API (to return a potential error instead of no return value) ? thanks, David