On Aug 15, 2007, at 8:36 AM, manphiz wrote:
Thanks for enlightening me on this! It seems templates may make printf-family something more ambitious. And following this lead, many plain C functions may also be excavated and refined with new power as well! I'm quite curious about where this is going.
On the other hand, I'm also a little bit doubt about whether this is something that C++ will be interested in. C interfaces was introduced into C++ intact to maintain compatibility, and it is likely to remain that way.
The original idea with a variadic-templates printf() was that it could replace the C printf by providing a superset of the C printf behavior under the same interface. Basically, it means that existing uses of printf(), when compiled with the new variadic-templates--- based printf, would get run-time checking of the format specifier "for free." I don't know if that's particularly useful or not. At the time, it was more like a flagship "hey, look what variadic templates can do!" idea.
So what's going to happen? Is there any discussion in this realm?
I don't believe this is being discussed. It's too late for such a change to get into C++0x, so the right answer is probably to revisit Boost.Format to determine whether we can now do something better. - Doug