[issue1580] Use shorter float repr when possible

[Raymond Hettinger]

Raymond Hettinger <rhettinger at users.sourceforge.net> added the comment:

Gay's code is 3800+ lines and includes many ifdef paths that we need to
get right.  Mark points out that the code itself needs additional work.
 The discussions so far also get into setting compiler flags on
different systems and I would imagine that that would need to be
maintained as those compilers change and as hardware gets updated.  The
main challenge for a maintainer is to be sure that any change doesn't
break something.  AFAICT, this code is very difficult to validate.

The comments is the first 180 lines of code give a good survey of the
issues a maintainer would face when given a bug report in the form of:
eval(repr(f)) != f for myhardware x compiled with mycompiler c with
myflags f and running on operating system z.  There reports would be
even more challenging for cross-platform comparisons.

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<http://bugs.python.org/issue1580>
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