Scott Turner wrote:
On 2004 November 16 Tuesday 06:42, Jérémy Bobbio wrote:This is what it boils down to for me. A post by Malcolm Wallace to one of the Haskell lists a few years back convinced me that:
There is a probleme with ShowS though: it is not internationalizable atPrintf is not adequate for internationalization either, because word (and thus parameter) ordering may vary among languages. Note that MissingH.Printf addresses this with a feature which supports keys in format items, e.g. %(item1)s.
all. Strings like printf's or with any kind of variable substitution is
required for proper internationalization / localization.
Internationalization is a killer application for printf-style format-string-based functions.
I have seen approximately 32767 different proposals for printf with strong static typechecking, using anything from specialized data types to depedently-typed functions to compile-time reflection.
None of these appears to be able to solve the simple problem of allowing localization (or general fiddling with the formatting) without recompiling and relinking. In that respect there will always be a place for dynamically-checked printf, and John's library really seems to be doing The Right Thing.
I remain much more skeptical that there's a need for a statically-checked printf which uses format strings. ShowS and related approaches work pretty well in my experience (though it'd be nice to see standardized support for flexible number formatting).
A Challenge To The Type System Hackers: Is there a way to get the best of both worlds? To do static checking on format strings when they're available, but fall back to dynamic checking when they are not? Perhaps we provide a canonical format string, or use some other sort of hackery, and then check the actual string dynamically.
-Jan-Willem Maessen
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