Few things II

[Bill Baxter]

Oskar Linde wrote:
> bearophile wrote:
>> 2d) Regarding the printing I think it's not nice that:
>> writefln(["1", "2"])
>> prints the same thing as:
>> writefln([1, 2])
>> So maybe writefln can use "" when printing strings inside arrays/AAs, 
>> to differentiate them.
> 
> In that case, writefln(1) should not print the same thing as 
> writefln("1") either. But I agree that it would be useful to have a 
> function that prints strings with "". Preferably, it should be able to 
> convert any expression of basic types into a string representation, that 
> when parsed by the compiler as a literal yields an identical value.
> 

This is the heart of the repr/str distinction from Python that was 
mentioned.  In Python instead of just one toString method, you have 
__str__ and __repr__.

__str__ is supposed to return a version that looks nice for "human reading"

__repr__ is supposed to return a string that (if possible) would 
recreate the object if passed to the interpreter.

So the str of "1" prints without quote characters, but repr of "1" 
prints with quotes.

--bb