On 08/02/16 12:34, Ole Streicher wrote: > I am working to get my "pyephem" package done for all available > (official and unofficial) ports. The major problem here is that it uses > "ascii_strtod() from the file "dtoa.c" by David M. Gray [1] that is > machine dependent.
>From the name, is it an extension for Python? Python has its own version of dtoa, crediting David M. Gay (I assume this is the same author you meant): https://sources.debian.net/src/python3.5/3.5.1-5/Python/dtoa.c/ so you might be able to call into libpython instead of reinventing it? Failing that, GLib has g_ascii_strtod(), which looks machine-independent and reasonably separable from the rest of GLib, and is much, much simpler than the one in Python - it might be somewhat slower, but I doubt that matters much on current hardware. In particular, on systems that support it (which should include all glibc systems like Debian, as far as I can see), it uses strtod_l() in the C locale instead of doing the parsing itself. As a general rule of thumb, good places to find implementations of useful but not-necessarily-portable functions like this are "make C more portable/pleasant" libraries like GLib, and language runtimes like Python :-) S
