On 6/26/13 8:36 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
On Wednesday, June 26, 2013 19:18:27 Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
On 6/26/13 1:50 PM, bearophile wrote:
Andrei Alexandrescu:
Actually this is good because it allows to customize the format string
to print only a subset of available information (I've actually used
this).
Your use case is a special case that breaks a general rule.
There's no special case here.
I have never heard anyone other than you even suggest this sort of behavior.
Granted, I may just not talk with the right people, but that at least makes it
sound like what you're suggesting is a very special case.
I'm not surprised. Not many people deal with things like localization or
internalization.
That
behavour is surprising, and it risks hiding some information silently.
Doesn't surprise me one bit.
Well, it shocks most of us.
I'm also not moved by argumentum ad populum.
We expect the number of arguments to a function to
match the number of parameters, and with format strings, you're basically
declaring what the parameters are, and then the other arguments to format or
writefln are the arguments to the format string. Most of us don't even think
about swapping out the format string at runtime.
That is the smoking gun.
Andrei
