On Sep 3, 2011, at 9:06 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote: > On 8/30/11 8:59 PM, Paul D. Anderson wrote: >> Can someone clarify for me the status and/or direction of string >> formatting in D? > [snip] > > I agree there are major inefficiencies and composability problems caused by a > blind toString() that creates a whole new string without any assistance. So > we need to fix that. > > There are suggestions to add this method to Object: > > void writeTo(void delegate(const(char)[]) sink, string format = null); > > Then, the suggestion goes, whether or not we deprecate toString, in the short > term it should be implemented in terms of writeTo. > > There are a few questions raised by this proposal: > > 1. Okay, this takes care of streaming text. How about streaming in binary > format? > > 2. Since we have a relatively involved "output to text" routine, how about an > "input from text" routine? If writeTo is there, where is readFrom?
Right. Which is why I've suggested in the past that we may want to use the serialization calls for toString.
