I know I'm coming a bit late to this discussion, but I wanted to point
out that the C99 standard does actually specify how many digits should
be in the exponent of a "%e"-formatted number:

In section 7.19.6, in the documentation for fprintf, it says:

"The exponent always contains at least two digits, and only as many more
digits as necessary to represent the exponent."

Not that that's necessarily a reason for Python to do the same :)