Dear all,
For me personally my biggest irritation with Julia is the fact that
@sprintf() is a macro and not a function. That means that I am always
forced to write the entire format string in one go. For example, this
doesn't work:
julia> fmt = "%3d"
"%3d"
julia> @sprintf(fmt,a)
ERROR: @sprintf: first argument must be a format string
If the format string is long, or if I want to generate it dynamically, this
quickly becomes cumbersome and irritating. I would much rather have a
traditional printf() and sprintf() function that I can use naturally:
fmt = "%15s - " * repeat(" %7.4f", 17)
printf(fmt * "\n", name, vals...)
Yes, it is possible to work around this seemingly arbitrary limitation, but
that goes against the spirit of writing code that is clear and simple. I
generally like Julia because the code is clear with very little extraneous
syntax, so the implementation of @sprintf sticks out like a sore thumb.
Is there any hope that this might change some day? I really don't
understand why we have to use a macro here. Even C/C++ can manage to have a
printf function. Why can't Julia?
Cheers,
Daniel.
