dmd 1.057 and 2.041 release

Andrei Alexandrescu SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org
Mon Mar 8 11:49:33 PST 2010


bearophile wrote:
> Andrei Alexandrescu:
> 
>> Sorry, this stays.
> 
> Then I'm not going to use the Phobos printing in all my future D2
> programs. As I was not using it in D1. I'm not going to change idea
> on this.
> 
> 
>> (e.g. the comma may be a decimal point in some languages, so is
>> [1,2] in a German locale an array of double with one value or two?<
>> 
> 
> In German you need no space after the comma, and there's no [] after
> and before it. So [1, 2] is not a floating point value in German.
> 
> 
>> Why one space?<
> 
> Because that's they way people print things in natural languages.
> It's a convention, you know. And it's a good one. It tells apart the
> FP numbers and it's the minimal.
> 
> 
>> It's the most neutral thing I could think of. Why no brackets?
>> Because of minimalism. You can very easy add them if you want
>> them.<
> 
> The purpose of things like the square brackets is to give a less
> ambiguous textual representation of the most common data structures
> (array and strings are the most common after numbers). So you put ""
> or '' around strings and [] to know what you are printing.

Your choice of leading/trailing symbols and of separators makes 'to' 
friendlier for printing e.g. debug strings. My choice makes it a 
primitive for text serialization. I'm not 100% sure which is the more 
frequent use and therefore which is the most appropriate as a default, 
but I'm leaning towards the latter.

Andrei


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