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From: Niklas Holsti <niklas.holsti@tidorum.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Running a preprocessor from GPS?
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 2015 16:55:52 +0300
Organization: Tidorum Ltd
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Xref: number.nntp.giganews.com comp.lang.ada:194517
Date: 2015-07-30T16:55:52+03:00
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On 15-07-30 15:23 , Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
> On Thu, 30 Jul 2015 04:51:48 -0700 (PDT), EGarrulo wrote:
>
>> Exactly!  And:
>>
>>     Printf ("Mr %Arg you have won %Arg dollars!\n", Surname, Amount);
>>
>> is much more readable than:
>
> It is not readable and it is not formatting, just string concatentation.
>
>>     Put ("Mr ");
>>     Put (Surname);
>>     Put (" you have won ");
>>     Put (Amount);
>>     Put (" dollars!");
>>     New_Line;
>

   [snip]

>> Not to mention that the order of the
>> arguments is hard-coded in the valid Ada snippet, whilst you could
>> need a different order to support formatted output in different
>> languages.
>
> And how is it different from printf, except that printf has a hard-coded
> order used twice rather than once (once in the format and once in the
> arguments), adding a nice source of run-time errors...

Some printf's support, in the "%" conversion specifications, an initial 
part of the form "%12$" to say that the argument to be converted is 
argument number 12 in the argument list. So the format string can pick 
the arguments in any order it wants -- even converting the same argument 
several times.

(I did not find this feature in the C99 standard. I don't know how 
widely it is supported.)

I don't have any experience of writing multilingual programs, but it 
seems to me that just supplying a language-specific format-string to 
printf is unlikely to be enough, even if this printf has this ability to 
pick arguments in any order.

-- 
Niklas Holsti
Tidorum Ltd
niklas holsti tidorum fi
       .      @       .