Re: Thoughts on Format

From: bill_kempf (williamkempf_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-01-31 10:05:12

--- In boost_at_y..., "Alisdair Meredith" <alisdair.meredith_at_u...> wrote:
> I'll second this!
> 
> I am not an old-school C coder, never had to learn printf and 
rigoroulsy avoid having anything to do with it.  My brief dealings 
found it far from intuitive and visually dense so I couldn't see the 
wood for the trees.
> 
> I'm also against *unnecessary* verbosity, and some of the iostream 
stuff may be too far the other way but at least it is clear.  When it 
comes to trade-offs, I'll take clarity over terseness!

There are ways to make iostream usage more terse... such as defining 
your own manipulators.  If you need to format a number as hex, left 
aligned in a 32 character column using capital hex digits, create a 
manipulator that sets all of these in one fell swoop.  It's really 
not difficult, makes the code much easier to read then any printf() 
statement, and gives you all of the benefits of iostreams (type 
safety, user type I/O and formatting, locales with the ability to 
expand for user types, etc.).  I don't like the idea of grafting 
printf style formatting onto iostreams, but we NEED a way to output 
positional parameters.

Bill Kempf