Escaping control in formatting

[Denis Shelomovskij]

23.04.2012 21:15, kenji hara написал:
> 2012年4月24日1:14 Denis Shelomovskij<verylonglogin.reg at gmail.com>:
>> 23.04.2012 18:54, kenji hara написал:
>>
>>> Please give us use cases. I cannot imagine why you want to
>>> change/remove quotations but keep escaped contents.
>>
>>
>> Sorry, I should mention that !' and !" are optional and aren't commonly
>> used, and all !?* are very optional and are here just for completeness
>> (IMHO).
>>
>> An example is generating a complicated string for C/C++:
>> ---
>> myCppFile.writefln(`tmp = "%!?"s, and %!?"s, and even %!?"s";`,
>>                    str1, str2, str3)
>> ---
>>
>>
>> --
>> Денис В. Шеломовский
>> Denis V. Shelomovskij
>
> During my improvements of std.format module, I have decided a design.
> If you format some values with a format specifier, you should unformat
> the output with same format specifier.
>
> Example:
>      import std.format, std.array;
>
>      auto aa = [1:"hello", 2:"world"];
>      auto writer = appender!string();
>      formattedWrite(writer, "%s", aa);
>
>      aa = null;
>
>      auto output = writer.data;
>      formattedRead(output, "%s",&aa);  // same format specifier
>      assert(aa == [1:"hello", 2:"world"]);
>
> More details:
>      https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/phobos/blob/master/std/format.d#L3264
>
> I call this "reflective formatting", and it supports simple text based
> serialization and de-serialization.
> Automatic quotation/escaping for nested elements is necessary for the feature.
>
> But your proposal will break this design very easy, and it is
> impossible to unformat the outputs reflectively.
>
> For these reasons, your suggestion is hard to accept.
>
> Kenji Hara

Is there sum misunderstanding?

Reflective formatting is good! But it isn't what you always want. It is 
needed mostly for debug purposes. But debugging is one of two usings of 
formatting, the second one is just writing something somewhere.

There are already some non-reflective constructs (like "%(%(%c%), %)" 
for a range and "X%sY%sZ" for strings) and I just propose adding more 
comfortable ones because every second time I use formatting I use it for 
writing (I mean not for debugging).

-- 
Денис В. Шеломовский
Denis V. Shelomovskij