Re: problem with formatting large integers

["Joseph Manning" <manning@...>]

On Fri, April 15, 2011 21:57, Roberto Ierusalimschy wrote:

>>> 4) Modify the current implementation of "string.format" so that all
>>>    "%i" (and "%d") conversions are intercepted and replaced by the
>>>    equivalent "%.0f" conversions, before then calling C's "sprintf".
>>>    This, imho, is the best overall approach.
>>
>> The problem with this option is that %.0f does not accept the same
>> options as %i (e.g., "%i.4").

Umm ... what does "%i.4" do?

BTW, in my original post, when I suggested converting "%i" into "%.0f",
I meant of course to include field widths as well, so that, for example,
"%12i" converts to "%12.0f", etc.

>>                                                Another, and maybe
better, option is
>> to compile Lua with the LUA_USELONGLONG option (on systems that
>> support long long).

But surely "%i" should be made to work correctly in ALL situations,
regardless of which particular compile-time options were chosen.
There's hardly a genuine situation in which

   string.format( "%i", 2^31 )  -->  -2147483648

is a reasonable or desirable outcome?

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Joseph Manning / Computer Science / UCC Cork Ireland / manning@cs.ucc.ie
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