On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 9:02 AM, Ian Lance Taylor <i...@google.com> wrote: > On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 3:18 AM, Gabriel Dos Reis > <g...@integrable-solutions.net> wrote: >> On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 6:16 PM, Lawrence Crowl <cr...@googlers.com> wrote: >> >>> And, as a side note, highly formatted output generally is not >>> much better than printf. For any text that needs to be localized, >>> I recommend that we stick with what we have. >> >> I agree with Lawrence that for texts that need localization, what >> we currently have is probably much better deployed. On the other hand, for >> debugging routines and in-memory formatting, IOStreams are >> very handy. > > I'm not deeply against iostreams, but I don't see that they bring us > any significant advantages over what we already have. We already have > typed check formatting, we can already write to a memory buffer. It > took a lot of work to get there, but that work has been done. It's > quite unlikely that we would ever want to use iostreams for > user-visible compiler output, because there is no straightforward > support for localization.
As I said earlier, our homegrown IO with localization is probably much better than what bare bones C++ IOstreams offer, so we are all in agreement over this. > So we are only talking about dump files and > debug output. Yes. > What parts of the compiler would be clearly better if > we used iostreams? Having to hardcode the format specifiers means that we are either restricted in changes or bound to (silent truncation) errors when we change representation. -- Gaby