Henning Thielemann writes:
Variable length argument lists are really a mess. Why are people so keen on them?
One advantage is that you need to type fewer characters. It's, well, not _that_ important, I'll readily admit. :-) But vsnprintf "i = %d;\tj = %s" 12 "test" is more compact than any other notation I'd be aware of. And it comes, of course, at the price of being rather dangerous, depending on what you do. Personally, I have found ShowS style text-formatting to be my favorite. The code verb = showString msg = (verb "i = ") . (12 `shows`) . (verb "\tj = ") $ "test" isn't mind-blowingly compact either, but I always feel an odd satisfaction when writing this, because it's supposedly very efficient -- which justifies the extra characters, IMHO. :-) Peter