Russ Cox - Google+: "Floating Point to Decimal Conversion is Easy
Floating point to decimal conversions have a reputation for being difficult. At heart, they're really very simple and straightforward. To prove it, I'll explain a working implementation. It only formats positive numbers, but expanding it to negative numbers, zero, infinities and NaNs would be very easy.
An IEEE 64-bit binary floating point number is an integer v in the range [252, 253) times a power of two: f = v × 2e. Constraining the fractional part of the unpacked float64 to the range [252, 253) makes the representation unique. We could have used any range that spans a multiplicative factor of two, but that range is the first one in which all the values are integers."
