Re: Incorrect output with OFMT="%.15e"

[Neil R. Ormos]

Andrew J. Schorr wrote:
> Keith Thompson wrote:

>> Ah, yes, I agree that it's not a bug, and using
>> printf rather than OFMT is the right thing to
>> do (if you want scientific notation) and not a
>> workaround.

> It is also discussed here in the gawk manual:

> https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Strings-And-Numbers.html

> | As a special case, if a number is an integer,
> | then the result of converting it to a string
> | is always an integer, no matter what the value
> | of CONVFMT may be.

> You may ask why OFMT and CONVFMT are handled the
> same way. I can think of 3 reasons: [...]

The manual could be improved by explicitly mentioning the special-case 
integer-value conversion behavior of OFMT, e.g., in section 5.4, instead of 
expecting users to infer that OFMT has special-case behavior that parallels the 
documented behavior of CONVFMT.

The manual states that "CONVFMT was introduced in order to separate the 
semantics of conversion from the semantics of printing," (6.1.4.1).  Most users 
won't be aware of the parallelism between CONVFMT and OFMT, and the "separate 
the semantics of conversion" phrase teaches away from the inference that they 
exhibit parallel behavior.  

In addition, perhaps the parallelism should be explicitly mentioned so users 
know that if they want to understand how OFMT works generally, they'll also 
need to read about CONVFMT.