[dmd-beta] std.format scheduled changes

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Wednesday, August 01, 2012 23:54:50 Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
> On 8/1/12, Walter Bright <walter at digitalmars.com> wrote:
> > http://ftp.digitalmars.com/dmd2beta.zip
> 
> So it says here:
> "format's current implementation is scheduled for replacement in
> November 2012. It will then be replaced with xformat's implementation.
> This will be seamless for most code, but it will make it so that the
> only argument that can be a format string is the first one, so any
> code which uses multiple format strings will break."
> 
> Other than that are there any other scheduled changes to format's
> behavior? It says format will eventually use xformat, but I don't
> really know how format is different than xformat right now.

The key thing is that xformat should be identical to writef, so it'll be much 
more consistent. I don't know what all of the little details are though. The 
breaking change (and why format's implementation wasn't just replaced without 
saying much abouet it) is that only the first string is treated as a format 
string with xformat, whereas apparently format treats _all_ strings as format 
strings. There may be some slight differences here and there, but for the most 
part, the change should be transparent.

- Jonathan M Davis