How many significant decimal digits for real single precision?

Yes, I was imprecise. It seems 6 are absolutely necessary.

What I was after is how many digits you have to print (say to save to a file) so that when you read it, you don’t lose any accuracy. Kahan also says 9 for this use case.

So I think there must be a single precision number that requires 9 digits. We should find it.