In practice the different placeholders give you a handle to achieve different formatting effects.
Compare for example: for x in range(15) : print '%02d' % x against: for x in range(15) : print '%02s' % x #the '0' in this case being redundant Or again: from math import pi print '%.4f' % pi print '%.4s' % pi #if that last seems silly consider print '%.4s % 'hello world' Given that there already exists an established (and documented) printf convention, one could argue that overloading (or even augmenting) the established placeholders is not the best option in this case. >If the above is the case, we could've avoided all those exceptions >that happen when a %d is specified but say a string is passed. Generally I prefer handling exceptions to avoiding them. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
