repr of floating points

[Josiah Carlson]

> repr(0.1) is '0.10000000000000001', in my Python 2.3.
>  From reading the article "Floating Point Arithmetic: Issues and 
> Limitations", I understand that it's the closest 17-digit decimal 
> representation of the binary floating-point number actually stored.
> 
> However, I don't understand why this should be what repr of floats 
> returns. repr should, if possible, return a string that evaluating it 
> will be == to the original object. But eval("0.1") obviously returns the 
> same floating point as 0.1 does! So why not make repr of floats return 
> the *shortest* decimal representation that will evaluate to the stored 
> binary number? Specifically, why not make repr(0.1) be "0.1"?

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  - Josiah