[m-dev.] for review: string__fmt

[Peter Ross]

On Fri, Aug 11, 2000 at 02:51:00PM +1000, Fergus Henderson wrote:
> On 10-Aug-2000, Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> > 
> > Apart from that, this looks fine now.
> 
> Sorry, I spoke a little to soon.
> There are several things that still need to be fixed:
> 
> 	- It needs to pass the test cases.
> 	  Currently the string__format test cases are failing.
> 
> 	- If the changes are sufficiently large that they might reasonably
> 	  be expected to cause backwards compatibility problems, then
> 	  even though interface design principles suggest we should only
> 	  have one string formatting function, the way we should achieve
> 	  that while retaining backwards compatibility is to give the
> 	  new code a new name and to deprecate the old version,
> 	  giving it a `pragma obsolete' declaration, rather than
> 	  removing it.  (Sorry I wasn't clear about this earlier.)
> 	  As I understand things, the changes to string__format are indeed
> 	  such that they might well cause backwards compatiblity problems
> 	  for our existing users.  Is that correct?
> 
Having now done all the test cases, and seeing some of the generated
output, I believe that we should remove the support for string__format
as it was still buggy.  In particular the second example is pretty nasty.
I am sure that there are other bugs in there as well.

Some examples:
    string__format("%6.3g\n", [f(3.0 / 4.0)]) = "0" now "0.75"
    string__format("%0 -10.5i", [i(-31)]) = "-000310000" now "-00031    "

One alternative would be to rename the new string__format to
string__fmt.  This would at least alert the users that the interface has
changed.

Pete
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