From: Bill Wood <william.wood3@comcast.net>
To: Alessandro Baretta <a.baretta@barettadeit.com>
Cc: Ocaml <caml-list@inria.fr>
Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Request for comments: Printf list conversion
Date: Thu, 12 Jan 2006 09:50:54 -0600 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <1137081054.29722.13.camel@localhost> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <43C61F1F.4030101@barettadeit.com>
On Thu, 2006-01-12 at 10:19 +0100, Alessandro Baretta wrote:
. . .
> What do you guys think about all this?
Just a comment. I've been anticipating getting into something like this
since I started considering OCaml as a work-horse language. I've gone
through this exercise several times -- When I worked in Prolog, I hacked
together a list formatter; after using Scheme a while I hacked out a
list formatter package (and I'm dreading doing it yet again :-). The
thing is, it's so terribly useful.
I'm always inspired in my hacks by Common Lisp's (format...) form, which
includes a ~{/~} pair containing conversion directives and that consumes
a list argument. I don't want to appall you with complexity too soon,
but when you think about this, consider the possibility that the list is
a list of lists, each of which contains several items that are to be
formatted using a a recursively specified (sub) format. This does
enhance usability a great deal. I'm sure that there are people who will
yelp in protest at this, but I do recommend looking at CL's format as at
least one point in this design space.
Good luck; I eagerly await your results :-)
-- Bill Wood
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2006-01-12 15:51 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 11+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2006-01-12 9:19 Alessandro Baretta
2006-01-12 9:31 ` [Caml-list] " Jean-Marc EBER
2006-01-12 9:55 ` Jean-Christophe Filliatre
2006-01-12 12:55 ` Damien Doligez
2006-01-12 13:27 ` Virgile Prevosto
2006-01-13 8:47 ` Jean-Christophe Filliatre
2006-01-12 15:50 ` Bill Wood [this message]
2006-01-12 17:39 ` Richard Jones
2006-01-12 19:29 ` Bill Wood
2006-01-13 9:31 ` Hendrik Tews
2006-01-13 16:28 ` Bill Wood
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