On Thursday, 20 April 2017 at 20:43:35 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
If you're doing internationalization, though, neither option is a good one (I gave an example using dates in another post): printf-style formats have ordering issues (is it year first, then month, then day? Or month first then day then year? Which argument is which?), and interpolated strings have the problem of exposing variable names to the translators (who are probably non-coders), potentially opening up the possibility of arbitrary code execution via l10n strings.
This is machine checkable though, the translation code could at least check that the interpolated strings in the translations match the source string's interpolations (possibly in a different order).
An issue remaining is: if successive interpolated values depend on the order they are evaluated in, translations can still cause bugs (when they change the order).
