Within the recent benchmark discussion, Gabriele made a comment which reminded me of a suggestion I have been meaning to make for some time. Almost every real application I write has a need for at least a rudimentary level of output formatting. Examples include: - truncating strings and/or padding strings with trailing blanks to a fixed length, - converting numerical values to string values, padding with leading blanks to a fixed length, - formatting decimal values as strings, complete with the usual sorts of leading-blank, trailing-zero, fractional-rounding string thrashing, - combining all of the above with interpolation into literal string data to form an entire message or output line. I understand/assume that the underlying REBOL infrastructure is written in C. Therefore... Please consider exposing an interface to printf-style formatting of data values into text. Let me quickly say that I don't view printf as anything NEAR the acme of readability or elegance, but it has a few offsetting benefits to compensate for its offputting appearance: 1) It's already in C, which I assume means it could be exposed in REBOL more quickly than a completely new formatting scheme could be conceived, designed, and developed. I certainly understand that RT has MANY priorities and demands on your time and personnel; I view this need as basic enough to justify considering a bit of a quick-and-dirty solution (and printf ain't hospital sanitary...) 2) It could serve as the underlying mechanism supporting nicer interfaces that could be build above as mezzanine functions. 3) A large portion of professional programmers have been exposed (in the epidemiological sense ;-) to C, and therefore would require almost no training or documentation to be able to use printf-style format strings. 4) It could provide a "standard" means of bridging the need until RT has the time to build a more elegant, REBOL-style solution. (Here I use "standard" in the sense of "available to everyone using REBOL", without the need to write one's own or go find some code written by someone else.) -jn-
