Exact textual representation of an IEEE “double”

Question

I need to represent an IEEE 754-1985 double (64-bit) floating point number in a human-readable textual form, with the condition that the textual form can be parsed back into

Answer 1

Yes, it can be done, though the implementation depends on the language. The basic idea is simply to print it out with sufficient precision.

Note that the reverse is not true though: some numbers that can be represented precisely in decimal simply cannot be represented in binary.