> How to calculate this “shortest unambiguous string” efficiently is more tricky than you might expect. In fact the best known algorithm for calculating it was

> How to calculate this “shortest unambiguous string” efficiently is more tricky than you might expect. In fact the best known algorithm for calculating it was published only in 2010, in the paper Printing Floating-Point Numbers Quickly and Accurately with Integers That's no longer the state-of-the-art. The latest approach - and possibly the end of the road for research her - is Andrysco et al.: http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~lerner/papers/fp-printing-popl16.pdf http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~lerner/papers/fp-printing-popl16.pdf It's been on the front page previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10915182 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10915182