Re: io.format (was: Reported to the Bloat Police: string.pack, .unpack and .packsize!)

["John Hind" <john.hind@...>]

>Date: Sat, 22 Aug 2015 17:08:14 -0400
>From: Sean Conner <sean@conman.org>

>I'll give "complex" a pass (given the the modifiers you can add), but
>where do you get "arbitrary" from?

>	%d - decimal output of a number
>	%o - octal output of a number
>	%x - hexidecimal output of a number
>	%s - string
>	%f - float
>	%q - quoted string

I'll give you a reciprocal pass on "arbitrary" then (though why 'x' for
hexadecimal
rather than 'h'?). My point is: why does this syntax not aspire to the same
degree
of readability as the rest of Lua? I do not think a proposal to shorten ALL
of Lua's
keywords to one letter prefixed by a randomly selected punctuation symbol 
(what have percentages got to do with string formatting?) would be
considered 
sensible! (OK, I've just taken back my pass on "arbitrary"!)

>Also, a format string does make it easier to handle translations. 
>Granted, this is geared more for compiled languages like C where (depending
>on the platform) it might be impossible to load variations on code (like a
>shared library [1]) but it can also be applied to languages like Perl, Lua,
>Ruby or Python.

I get why C did this (especially in conjunction with the "resource" system
in Windows
EXE files, which supported positional tokens long before Python)), but it is
not necessary
in a scripting language. It is just as easy (and much more flexible) to
write a translation 
support tool that emits Lua source for functions in a table as strings in a
table.

>  -spc (Why the hate for format strings?  Did printf() bite you as a kid?)

It still bites me every day! It (plus regular expressing patterns, string
literal escapes and
now pack/unpack codes) are the only things I have to dig out a reference
manual for 
every time I use them. It does not help that the Lua reference manual can't
be 
bothered to document format strings completely, referring out to  "the ISO C
function 
sprintf", so now I need a C reference to hand as well as a Lua one!

-John


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