Raymond Hettinger <pyt...@rcn.com> writes: > In my quick research, it looks like many languages offer > nothing more than the usual C style % formatting and defer > the rest for a local aware module.
Hendrik van Rooyen's mention of Cobol's "picture" (aka PIC) specifications might be added to the list. Cautionary tale: I once had a similar idea and suggested including a bastardized version of PIC in an extension language for something I worked on once. Another programmer then coded a reasonable PIC subset and we shipped it. Turned out that a number of our users were Cobol experts and once we had anything like PIC, they expected the weirdest and most obscure features (of which there were quite a few) of real Cobol PIC to work. We ended up having to assign someone a fairly lengthy task of figuring out the Cobol spec and implementing every last damn PIC feature. But I digress. > > example, I think Common Lisp has a feature for formatting thousands. > Do you have more detail? http://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/cltl/clm/node200.html gives as an example: (format nil "The answer is ~:D." (expt 47 x)) => "The answer is 229,345,007." -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
