On Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:49:33 -0500, Andrei Alexandrescu
<seewebsiteforem...@erdani.org> wrote:
bearophile wrote:
Andrei Alexandrescu:
Sorry, this stays.
Then I'm not going to use the Phobos printing in all my future D2
programs. As I was not using it in D1. I'm not going to change idea
on this.
(e.g. the comma may be a decimal point in some languages, so is
[1,2] in a German locale an array of double with one value or two?<
In German you need no space after the comma, and there's no [] after
and before it. So [1, 2] is not a floating point value in German.
Why one space?<
Because that's they way people print things in natural languages.
It's a convention, you know. And it's a good one. It tells apart the
FP numbers and it's the minimal.
It's the most neutral thing I could think of. Why no brackets?
Because of minimalism. You can very easy add them if you want
them.<
The purpose of things like the square brackets is to give a less
ambiguous textual representation of the most common data structures
(array and strings are the most common after numbers). So you put ""
or '' around strings and [] to know what you are printing.
Your choice of leading/trailing symbols and of separators makes 'to'
friendlier for printing e.g. debug strings. My choice makes it a
primitive for text serialization. I'm not 100% sure which is the more
frequent use and therefore which is the most appropriate as a default,
but I'm leaning towards the latter.
No it doesn't.
Tell me how you would parse the following text serialization string for a
string[]:
hello world how are you
What if it was a string[][]?
Compare that to:
[hello world, [how are, you]]
That is almost completely unambiguous (you still have to account for
literal commas or brackets), whereas you have a multitude of choices with
the first version.
The thing is, friendlier for text-based serialization is almost identical
to friendlier for printing. In fact, friendlier for text-based
serialization should have even more annotations to escape delimiters.
In fact, I find the defaults you defined not useful in most cases.
Printing or serializing, I want to see the delimiters for the arrays,
elements, and subarrays.
-Steve
