Re:A quest for safe text formatting API
by tyingq on Saturday June 19, 2021 @10:27PM
(#27566559)
"Formatting facilities in languages other than C are usually type-safe. For example, in Python you get an exception when trying to format a string as an integer"
Seems like that section could use more examples. A fair amount of dynamic languages won't bomb if you try to format a string as a number with their s/printf equivalent. They coerce the string into a number, with sometimes unexpected (though documented) results. Perl, PHP, and awk all do this.
Re:A quest for safe text formatting API
by flakiness on Saturday June 19, 2021 @11:26PM
(#27566837)
First heard about consteval. This is cool, but every time C++ adds new and obscure features like this I cannot stop feeling helpless. Rust-like macros are fine, and old languages like Java have linter checks that provides type safety to the format string [1].
Aren't these enough? Apparently no.
There could be a world where people stick with this kind of "pragmatic" solution and stay away from without doing spec-puzzle-solving. C++ is not that world and I've accepted that, but let's make sure the other side holds the majority vote.
[0]: https://zgcoder.net/ramblings/typesafe-printf/ [1]: https://fstarlang.github.io/general/2017/11/23/sprintfstar.h...
Seems like that section could use more examples. A fair amount of dynamic languages won't bomb if you try to format a string as a number with their s/printf equivalent. They coerce the string into a number, with sometimes unexpected (though documented) results. Perl, PHP, and awk all do this.
Aren't these enough? Apparently no.
There could be a world where people stick with this kind of "pragmatic" solution and stay away from without doing spec-puzzle-solving. C++ is not that world and I've accepted that, but let's make sure the other side holds the majority vote.
[1] https://errorprone.info/bugpattern/FormatString
There are plenty of esoterically templates shenanigans in C++ but this isn't one of them.
https://www.stackage.org/haddock/lts-18.0/base-4.14.1.0/Text...