On 27/10/2007, Brendan Eich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Oct 27, 2007, at 11:06 AM, Dan Scott wrote: > > > Just following up on the discussion - since I've seen an > > announcement that the spec for ES4 is now closed, does this mean > > that a proposal for an addition of a standardized sprintf / format > > addition to the String object is off the table until ES5? Or have > > the Ecma members of the group decided that there is no actual > > requirement for this functionality? > > See http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php? > id=discussion:string_formatting and also http://wiki.ecmascript.org/ > doku.php?id=meetings:minutes_feb_24_2006&s=string+formatting, which > contains: > > # String formatting choices: > * Leave out, defer to the emergent standard library ecology? > Then lose type system tie-in opportunites. > * .NET vs. MSCOM vs. Java vs. others leaves no single obvious > choice of what to imitate. > * OCaml, other precedents? Roll-our-own function-combinatorial > typed formatting? Too inconvenient. > * Ed points out that strings imply localization, more worms. > > These considerations suggested to us that we defer this to the > library ecosystem. But we could have missed an opportunity here.
Ah, fabulous - it seems that although the term "sprintf" appears in the wiki, it's highlighted and therefore doesn't turn up in a search for the term. And I was too dumb to search for "string format" -- thanks for letting me know that the issue had been raised in the past and that there had been some discussion about it. > Beyond raising this issue on the mailing list and finding some > > support in principle for the proposal, if not for the actual form > > of the proposal, I'm not sure what the next step is supposed to be. > > It does seem like a major functionality gap in the language, to me, > > but I'm only one small voice. > > In your view, is it a gap in the standard library, a gap to fill by > competing libraries before anything is standardized, or truly a gap > in the core language? For there to be a gap in the core language, it > seems to me the proposal must involve static type checking of actual > arguments against format specifiers. Otherwise, as Lars noted in the > discussion page, even ES3 has enough reflection to build a > dynamically type-safe formatter as library code. Successful Ajax > libraries have built such things. I n my view, it's simply a gap in the standard library (and I apologize if this was not the correct forum to raise concerns about the standard library vs. the core language spec). As I noted at the outset, there are a wide variety of sprintf() (and probably String.format()) implementations already out in the wild under various licenses and with varying sophistication. I believe that adding such a method to the standard library would help simplify the current situation and increase the ease of reusing code between projects. Thanks for taking the time to respond, Brendan - I really appreciate it, as well as the rest of your efforts to bring ES4 to fruition. -- Dan Scott Laurentian University
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