best replacement for - cout << "hello D" << endl; ?

[Bruce Adams]

Jarrett Billingsley Wrote:

> "Bruce Adams" <tortoise_74 at no.spam.ya.hoo.co.uk> wrote in message 
> news:f71fdt$rfp$1 at digitalmars.com...
> 
> >   I'm trying to find the 'best' replacement for C++ streaming I/O.
> > I dislike C style format strings because of the type safety issue and run 
> > time interpretation issues. I'm pretty sure D works around this using a 
> > typeinfo array but I keep losing the function. I understand that writefln 
> > is now favoured over printf 
> > (http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?HowTo/printf).
> 
> Type safety is not an issue with Phobos' formatting strings; they just 
> happen to look like printf's formatting.  In fact you can just use %s for 
> everything, and it'll figure it all out at runtime.  However if runtime type 
> identification for formatted printing is not what you're looking for, you 
> won't find any alternative in Phobos.

std.format.doFormat almost does what I want. It takes any array of TypeInfo objects and another array of arguments so that at there is at least a chance for type safety of some of the conversion being enforced at compile time. 

What is "dout" for? When would you use it instead of stdout?
 
> For that, there's Tango (http://www.dsource.org/projects/Tango), an 
> alternative community-driven standard library for D which is quickly gaining 
> popularity.  One of Tango's claims to fame is its much more flexible and 
> powerful IO framework.  I'm not sure if it still provides the C++ style << 
> and >> for writing and reading (they may have been removed), but it uses the 
> same basic idea of chained overloaded operator calls, but using the call 
> operator instead of the shift operators.  For example, here is a use of the 
> Stdout object, similar to C++'s cout:
> 
> import tango.io.Stdout;
> 
> void main()
> {
>     int x = 6;
>     Stdout("X is: ")(x).newline;
> }
> 
> Like in C++ streams, each item is outputted separately, and uses its own 
> method overload, avoiding runtime type identification.  Objects which read 
> use the same syntax (called "whisper" for reasons I don't entirely 
> understand ;) ).
>
That is so ugly. I haven't found a page on operator overloading yet but there must be better choices availabe. Even ++ as a binary operator would be better.
 
> Of course there's also C#-style formatted printing:
> 
> Stdout.formatln("X is: {}", x);
> 
> Which, like Phobos' format() family of function (including writefln()), uses 
> RTTI to correctly output the formatted values.  This is also necessary for 
> any custom formatting, such as outputting hex integers or field widths, 
> since there is no analogue to the i.e. ios::hex as in C++ for the chained 
> output method. 
>