On 8/4/07, Greg Ewing <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Ron Adam wrote: > > Which would result in a first column that right aligns, a second column > > that centers unless the value is longer than 100, in which case it right > > align, and cuts the end, and a third column that left aligns, but cuts off > > the right if it's over 15. > > All this talk about cutting things off worries me. In the > case of numbers at least, if you can't afford to expand the > column width, normally the right thing to do is *not* to cut > them off, but replace them with **** or some other thing that > stands out. > > This suggests that the formatting and field width options may > not be as easily separable as we would like.
I remember a language that did the *** thing; it was called Fortran. It was an absolutely terrible feature. A later language (Pascal) solved it by ignoring the field width if the number didn't fit -- it would mess up your layout but at least you'd see the value. That strategy worked much better, and later languages (e.g. C) followed it. So I think a maximum width is quite unnecessary for numbers. For strings, of course, it's useful; it can be made part of the string-specific conversion specifier. -- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/) _______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
