Dragon4 and Grisu3: algorithms to display floating point numbers

I recently encountered a reference to algorithms called Dragon4 and Grisu3; curious as to what they were I read an enlightening blog “Here be dragons: advances in problems you didn’t even know you had”. I was quite astonished that the display of floating point numbers was even a difficult problem and that there was a significant advance on the topic relatively recently.

The recent advance is the article “Printing floating-point numbers quickly and accurately with integers” by Florian Loitsch (2010), and is worth reading, if only to get a flavour of the problem and the history of attempted solutions.