On Wed, 17 Nov 2004, Vincenzo Ciancia wrote:
On Tuesday 16 November 2004 10:37, Henning Thielemann wrote:
Variable length argument lists are really a mess. Why are people so keen on them? What is the advantage over a plain list as single argument? Is vsprintf "%s, your age is %s\n" ["John", show (10::Integer)] really too complicated?
The implementation of printf in ocaml, for example, is not only type-safe, but "more type safe" than passing a list, because the number and type of arguments is known at compile time.
Can this be also achieved for extended versions implemented by OCaml users, say for printf's with more placeholder types? What about variable format strings? I assume that it is very hard to solve all these problems and I wonder if it is worth the trouble ...