phobos / tango / ares

[Kevin Bealer]

Lars Ivar Igesund wrote:
> Kevin Bealer wrote:
> 
>> Lars Ivar Igesund wrote:
>>> Frits van Bommel wrote:
>>>
>>>> Which one to use is hard to say at this point. I've been trying out
>>>> Tango since its release and I like it but I sometimes miss some parts of
>>>> Phobos. Whether this is because Phobos is just more familiar to me or
>>>> actually better is hard to say...
>>> Note that what you miss that you feel you have in Phobos, is very much
>>> part of the feedback we would like.
>>>
>> Okay -- I'm really sorry if any of this seems to have a negative tone.
>> I hesitate to write this since I have a lot of respect for the Tango
>> design in general, but there are a couple of friction points I've noticed.
>>
>> 1. writefln / format replacements
>>
>> Concerning standard output and string formatting, in phobos I can do
>> these operations:
>>
>>    writefln("%s %s %s", a, b, c);
>>    format("%s %s %s", a, b, c);
>>
>> How do I do these in Tango?  The change to "{0} {1}" stuff is fine with
>> me, in fact I like it, but this syntax:
>>
>>    Stdout.formatln("{0} {1} {2}", a, b, c);
>>    Format!(char).convert("{0} {1} {2}", a, b, c);
> 
> I can't give you an immediate solution for the "length" of the
> Stdout.formatln, but usually one would use tango.text.convert.Sprint for
> what you use the formatter for. If you only want to print values, there are
> non-formatting ways to do that. We may be able to give you quicker/easier
> help over our forum if you have followups? May make it easier for us to
> integrate solutions into our documentation too if needed.
> 

In the future I'll post this kind of thing on the tango forum, but since 
this thread is already here:

I looked at this but doesn't Sprint require something like:

     char[] foo = (new Sprint!(char))("hello {0}", 123);

1. A template instance is needed.

2. It creates a new class object (Sprint) -- you can't use a single
    global one in real code because according to the docs it owns the
    internal buffer and is thus not thread safe.

3. That object contains a new buffer which must be allocated.

4. As far as I can tell, it requires almost as much syntax as
    Format!(char) ( my previous example didn't include the 'new'
    as shown here: )

     char[] one = (new Format!(char)).convert("{0}", 123);
     char[] foo = (new Sprint!(char))("hello {0}", 123);

I haven't looked at the design of std.format but I would think it only 
suffers from #3 above, which is not too surprising since you would 
expect a string generation to require a new buffer.

Sprint seems like a good solution in something like an XML formatting 
loop, because you can build one object and its in a function call so the 
thread safety issue is not critical, you can reuse it many times, but as 
a drop in for 'std.format' it seemed kind of awkward to me.

Kevin