wth!! ctfe cannot format floating point at compile time?

[Johnson via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Monday, 14 August 2017 at 03:44:27 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> On Monday, 14 August 2017 at 01:52:16 UTC, Johnson Jones wrote:
>> pretty simply, trying to convert a floating point to a string 
>> in a ctfe function and it thinks that it is too complex to do 
>> in a ctfe, really?
>
> It uses a C function to do the conversion, which is not 
> available at compile time since CTFE can't run extern functions.
>
> And it is a LOT harder to do than you might think which is why 
> it still uses the C function - implementing one in D is legit 
> pretty complex.
>
> When I first saw this too, I figured it must be simple to slap 
> something together, even if it is horribly inefficient and 
> doesn't work everywhere... and I ended up giving up after 
> spending a few hours on it too. If you search the web, you get 
> academic papers describing it, eeek.
>
> Of course, it might be reasonable to port one of the C 
> implementations directly... but even that is a fairly big job 
> (and you might as well just call the C function itself for all 
> but CTFE cases) - the GNU one is 1,300 lines, for example. And 
> that has an incompatible license with the rest of druntime!

I don't believe that! Just run dmd on it like ctfe does. Maybe 
the problem is that to should be a bit more intelligent and if it 
is ran at ctfe should try something else.

I don't see why it would be all that difficult maybe for complex 
floating point numbers it is but for most ordinary numbers used 
as most literals(e.g., terminating decimals), it is very very 
easy to convert. It is not much more difficult than storing it as 
a string.

After all 0.43425 is actually a string that will be converted to 
fp. I realize there are accuracy issues but I seriously think 
there should be something suitable rather than crapping out ;/ 
e.g., 0.43425 = 43425/100000.

Remember, we are converting a literal string represented floating 
point value to a string. It should be a direct conversion. 
Basically a copy and paste. (at run time, it is different, 
obviously since the value is actually a fp, but at compile time 
it is simply a string.
There is this trick as workaround:

As HypperParrow says, it's easy as pi:

```
auto valueToString(alias v)(){return v.stringof;}
enum a = valueToString!(0.75);
static assert(a == "0.75");
```


to!string(float) should detect that and just do it. No need to 
try to do anything complex.