Tomek Sowiński wrote:
Don <nos...@nospam.com> napisał(a):
The efficiency issues are important, but are not the primary motivation.
toString() is just wrong. The idea that there is ONE AND ONLY ONE
textual representation of an object, is, frankly, idiotic.
I always thought of toString() as an aid in debugging, where having one
and only way to print out an object makes sense.
It isn't just used in debugging. It's used for writefln.
But even for debugging, it doesn't work.
If I have a struct:
struct Foo
{
Complex!(double) val;
}
and, for debugging purposes, I want to write 'val' to 10 decimal places.
How do I do that?
But strong words
suggest you see something I don't. What problems does offering choice
solve? How and to whom would I pass my choice?
Creating a wrapper for the simple case is trivial, once you have the
more general case.
The simple case doesn't need to integrated into the compiler and runtime
at all. (Nor does the general case, actually, a fact which is not
recognized in the DIP). I think it's actually a hack from the days
before the language had templates.
