@User Perhaps this is in your area of expertise? How picky are the tools reading liberty files about the exact float format? Do they require 11 digits (+optional sign) even if the last digits are all zeroes? Is it a bad thing to drop the last digit for certain ranges of values? Will they get angry about a leading white space?

This is definitely not my area of expertise. My observation, though, is that the liberty file format looks like a poorly conceived conglomeration of about eight different formats. It leans in the direction of accepting almost any syntax. I would expect it to accept pretty much any kind of number you throw at it, whether it's an integer, floating-point, fixed-point, in quotes, parentheses, braces, engineering notation, etc. White space appears to be a don't-care except when it isn't. (That, in my experience, is the ultimate rule of syntax in liberty files: The syntax is correct unless it isn't.)

It's definitely an eclectic format and I have no ambition to dig deeper than necessary. Someone has clearly put effort into formatting floats before writing them into the liberty files, so I was hoping to find someone who could some light on that. Maybe it's all just some arbitrary thing that no one remembers anymore why they did

I think that was Tim Ansell's doing. Because the liberty files were so huge, he broke them up into constituent parts and they get reassembled from the parts by the skywater-pdk Makefile "make timing". Some part of that was enforcing consistency on everything in the file, so it doesn't surprise me that all the floating point values have exactly the same format. But it doesn't mean anything as far as the liberty file format itself is concerned.

Aha. Interesting. I'll ask the other Tim then if he knows more about this

This assumes that you are referring to the various liberty files in the skywater PDK, which I assumed you were.

That's a correct assumption. I'm specifically trying to do something about the liberty generation script that takes way too long time to run'

Oh, I've got a few of those kind of scripts, too!