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Enhancment Request/Suggestion

 [1/4] from: joel:neely:fedex at: 19-Sep-2000 17:25


Within the recent benchmark discussion, Gabriele made a comment which reminded me of a suggestion I have been meaning to make for some time. Almost every real application I write has a need for at least a rudimentary level of output formatting. Examples include: - truncating strings and/or padding strings with trailing blanks to a fixed length, - converting numerical values to string values, padding with leading blanks to a fixed length, - formatting decimal values as strings, complete with the usual sorts of leading-blank, trailing-zero, fractional-rounding string thrashing, - combining all of the above with interpolation into literal string data to form an entire message or output line. I understand/assume that the underlying REBOL infrastructure is written in C. Therefore... Please consider exposing an interface to printf-style formatting of data values into text. Let me quickly say that I don't view printf as anything NEAR the acme of readability or elegance, but it has a few offsetting benefits to compensate for its offputting appearance: 1) It's already in C, which I assume means it could be exposed in REBOL more quickly than a completely new formatting scheme could be conceived, designed, and developed. I certainly understand that RT has MANY priorities and demands on your time and personnel; I view this need as basic enough to justify considering a bit of a quick-and-dirty solution (and printf ain't hospital sanitary...) 2) It could serve as the underlying mechanism supporting nicer interfaces that could be build above as mezzanine functions. 3) A large portion of professional programmers have been exposed (in the epidemiological sense ;-) to C, and therefore would require almost no training or documentation to be able to use printf-style format strings. 4) It could provide a "standard" means of bridging the need until RT has the time to build a more elegant, REBOL-style solution. (Here I use "standard" in the sense of "available to everyone using REBOL", without the need to write one's own or go find some code written by someone else.) -jn-

 [2/4] from: sterling::rebol::com at: 19-Sep-2000 16:25


A quick comment: I understand what you're asking for and I personally think that it is important as well but remember that "quick-and-dirty today" often equals "major legacy problem" tomorrow. I bet a lot of bloat in existing software can be attributed to this type of thing. Those are some footsteps that we would rather not follow and I think you don't want us headed that way either. I believe Carl already has in mind how he wants to solve these types of formatting issues within REBOL. I don't know when it'll happen though. Take care, Sterling

 [3/4] from: rebol:techscribe at: 19-Sep-2000 16:37


Hi Joel, have you looked at http://www.rebol.org/utility/format.html
>From the intro:
Purpose: { A few functions for formatting. FORMAT aims to be a Reboloid replacement for sprintf. It converts data into strings, with rounding of decimal values, choice of scientific or fixed-point notation, padding to a given length, and right and left justification. FORMAT also handles blocks of data, with corresponding blocks of formatting options to be applied to successive items. QT is useful for printing out long blocks of words or numerical data, and QC formats and prints out tabular data stored in nested blocks. FULL-FORM returns a string representation of a decimal that will load back to exactly the original value. All values that correspond to an exact integer up to 2 ** 53 are represented as an integer. } At 05:25 PM 9/19/00 -0500, you wrote:
>Within the recent benchmark discussion, Gabriele made a comment >which reminded me of a suggestion I have been meaning to make
<<quoted lines omitted: 37>>
> some code written by someone else.) >-jn-
;- Elan [ : - ) ] author of REBOL: THE OFFICIAL GUIDE REBOL Press: The Official Source for REBOL Books http://www.REBOLpress.com visit me at http://www.TechScribe.com

 [4/4] from: jhagman:infa:abo:fi at: 20-Sep-2000 5:43


Quoting [sterling--rebol--com] ([sterling--rebol--com]):
> I believe Carl already has in mind how he wants to solve these types > of formatting issues within REBOL. I don't know when it'll happen > though.
I hope this happens sooner rather than later, because it seems weird that a language is used for scripting, and is aimed to be able to replace perl, has no standard means of formatting text. Formatting text is what most perl programs do. If REBOL really wants to guide perl programmers to the right direction a standard means of text formatting is a must. I thought once that Carl had commented this on the list, but I was unable to find the article. I used slow Rebol.org then so maybe I just had not the patience. -- Jussi Hagman CS in Åbo Akademi University Studentbyn 4 D 33 [juhagman--abo--fi] 20540 Åbo [jhagman--infa--abo--fi] Finland

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