The familiar printf is unsafe: nothing prevents us from passing to printf more or fewer arguments than required by the format specification, or passing the arguments of wrong types. The error is discovered only at run-time. The implementation of printf in Haskell, alas, retains this problem. There is also a desire to better integrate printf with Show, so we can format the value of any showable type: we'd like to have something like the ~a specification of Common Lisp. Integrating printf with show, thus making it generic, is quite easy. The implementation is still Haskell98. It has just been posted: http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2009-June/062410.html Given its simplicity, one may wonder why it was not mentioned in the Haskell98 report or included in standard libraries. The safety problem still remains: we'd like to prevent the mismatch between the arguments of printf and the format specification statically. That too is easy to accomplish. Type-safe printf has been described by Olivier Danvy back in 1998. It is part of SML/NJ. The only remaining bit is to convert the formatting _string_ to the more representative and more useful to the type-checker form. That too is easy, with Template Haskell (as Ryan Ingram remarked). The following code implements that suggestion. Aside from the use of template Haskell, it is Haskell98. Beside the familiar format specifications %s and %d, in implements the specification %a to format any showable value. The code is available at http://okmij.org/ftp/typed-formatting/TotalPrintF.hs http://okmij.org/ftp/typed-formatting/TFTest.hs The second file contains these examples: module TFTest where import TotalPrintF t1 = printf $(spec "Hello, there!") -- "Hello, there!" t2 = printf $(spec "Hello, %s!") "there" -- "Hello, there!" t3 = printf $(spec "The value of %s is %d") "x" 3 -- "The value of x is 3" -- Mismatch between the formatting string and the printf arguments -- is a type error. -- t31 = printf $(spec "The value of %s is %d") "x" True -- Couldn't match expected type `Bool' against inferred type `Int' {- t32 = printf $(spec "The value of %s is %d") "x" 3 10 Couldn't match expected type `t1 -> t' against inferred type `String' Probable cause: `printf' is applied to too many arguments -} t4 = let x = [9,16,25] i = 2 in printf $(spec "The element number %d of %a is %a") i x (x !! i) -- "The element number 2 of [9,16,25] is 25"