At the risk of getting off topic... the reason 'C' has printf is because it is not polymorphic. Printf is a hack to allow different types to be printed out, such that they did not need printInt, printFloat etc. Remember C is typesafe, so the only way they could do this was to pass the first argument (the format string) to extract the types of the following arguments. Haskell doesn't need such tricks as it is polymorphic, we can just use 'show' no matter what the type is. Keean. Peter Simons wrote:
Henning Thielemann writes:
One advantage is that you need to type fewer characters.
I know memory is expensive, that's why only the last two digits of year numbers are stored. :-]
I understand what you're getting at -- and I find it annoying, too, when people sacrifice robustness for comfort.
I'm not sure, though, whether this is the case here, because vsnprintf in Haskell still is type-safe. You'll get more complicated error messages, the memory footprint might be worse, but it still _is_ robust code.
Perhaps it really is a matter of personal taste.
Just for the sake of seeing the point from all possible perspectives, I could think of another reason why you might need a function like that: If you want to provide printf-style variable substitutions to the user, say in a config file. People are _used_ to this mechanism, and many programs I know offer this feature to customize text templates, etc. It can't hurt to have a function that does the parse job and returns the result for you.
Although, if you think this through, you'll soon arrive at the conclusion that for this particular use-case hard-coded place-holders (like %s, %d, etc.) are not that useful. You'd like to be able to (easily!) extend the function, to offer a more general variable substitution, like sh(1) does. So that you could write
Dear ${customer},
are you interested in making ${phantasy-number} fast?
and pass a function (String -> a) to vsnprintf which does the lookup. I'm not sure how having different types of values in the dictionary plays into this, though.
You can save even more characters:
msg = verb "i = " . shows 12 . verb "\tj = " $ "test"
Right! One more reason to use ShowS-style. :-)
Peter
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