https://github.com/lindahua/Formatting.jl
--Tim
On Monday, March 23, 2015 05:50:49 AM Daniel Carrera wrote:
> 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.
