On 8/16/07, Paul Moore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 16/08/07, Ron Adam <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Currently these particular examples aren't the syntax supported by the PEP. > > It's an alternative/possibly syntax only if there is enough support for a > > serial left to right specification pattern as outlined. > > Ah, I hadn't realised that. I've been skipping most of the > discussions, mainly because of the lack of concrete examples :-) > > > I think most of developers here are still looking at various details and > > are still undecided. Do you have a preference for one or the other yet? > > As evidenced by the fact that I failed to notice the difference, I > can't distinguish the two :-) > > All of the examples I've seen are hard to read. As Greg said, I find > that I have to study the format string, mentally breaking it into > parts, before I understand it. This is in complete contrast to > printf-style "%.10s" formats. I'm not at all sure this is anything > more than unfamiliarity, compounded by the fact that most of the > examples I see on the list are relatively complex, or edge cases. But > it's a major barrier to both understanding and acceptance of the new > proposals. > > I'd still really like to see: > > 1. A simple listing of common cases, maybe taken from something like > stdlib uses of %-formats. Yes, most of them would be pretty trivial. > That's the point!
Seconded! This discussion needs some grounding. > > 2. A *very short* comparison of a few more advanced cases - I'd > suggest formatting floats as fixed width, 2 decimal places (%5.2f), > formatting 8-digit hex (%.8X) and maybe a simple date format > (%Y-%m-%d). Yes, those are the sort of things I consider advanced. > Examples I've seen in the discussion aren't "advanced" in my book, > they are "I'll never use that" :-) > > 3. Another very short list of a couple of things you can do with the > new format, which you can't do with the existing % formats. > Concentrate here on real-world use cases - tabular reports, reordering > fields for internationalisation, things like that. As a data point, > I've never needed to centre a field in a print statement. Heck, I > don't even recall ever needing to specify how the sign of a number was > printed! > > I get the impression that the "clever" new features aren't actually > going to address the sorts of formatting problems I hit a lot. That's > fine, I can write code to do what I want, but there's a sense of YAGNI > about the discussion, because (for example) by the time I need to > format a centred, max-18, min-5 character number with 3 decimal places > and the sign hard to the left, I'm also going to want to dot-fill a > string to 30 characters and insert commas into the number, and I'm > writing code anyway, so why bother with an obscure format string that > only does half the job? (It goes without saying that if the format > string can do everything I want, that argument doesn't work, but then > we get to the complexity issues that hit regular expressions :-)) > > Sorry if this sounds a bit skeptical, but there's a *lot* of > discussion here over a feature I expect to use pretty infrequently. > 99% of my % formats use nothing more than %s! > > Paul. > _______________________________________________ > Python-3000 mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 > Unsubscribe: > http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/rhamph%40gmail.com > -- Adam Olsen, aka Rhamphoryncus _______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
