From: Gavin Kistner <gavin@...>
Date: 2005-11-01T23:58:25+09:00
Subject: Re: Newbie: How to format a number to always show two decimals?

On Nov 1, 2005, at 7:49 AM, David A. Black wrote:
> On Tue, 1 Nov 2005, Gavin Kistner wrote:
>> On Oct 31, 2005, at 5:41 PM, David A. Black wrote:
>>> Aside to Phrogz: is that left over from a game of code golf?? :-)
>> LOL. No, before I grokked sprintf, I needed the round_to  
>> functionality. That's a port of the Number.toFixed algorithm from  
>> section 15.7.4.5 of the ECMAScript (ECMA-262) specs:
> Interesting pedigree.
>
> It was the semi-colons and the vacuum-packed syntax that made me think
> it might be a multi-line split-out of a former golf entry :-)

Ah, no. Upon reflection, those are because the ruby code is actually  
a port of my JavaScript version of that algorithm. Microsoft's own  
implementation of Number.toFixed did not (at some point, perhaps  
currently) conform to that algorithm (and other JS engines did not at  
some point support that method, despite it being part of the spec) so  
I wrote my own JS-only port to patch bad engines as needed. When it  
came time to for the Ruby version, a bit of syntax conversion seems  
to be all I did.

At the point in my life when I wrote the JS version, I was very into  
very terse formatting. Whitespace seemed to be at a premium during  
that dark period. :)