Post a Comment On: cbloom rants

AH HAHA HA ! I think I finally I have the one true printf solution. I can now do : autoprintf("hello world\n"); autoprintf("hello ",7," world\n"); autoprintf("hello %03d\n",7); autoprintf("hello ","world %.1f",3.f,"\n"); autoprintf("hello %d",3," world %.1f\n",3.f); autoprintf("hello ",(size_t)400,"\n"); autoprintf("hello ",L"unicode is balls"," \n"); autoprintf("hello ",String("world")," \n"); In particular, all of the following things work : Regular old printf stuff works just like always. .. except that it does type validation against the format string using my old "safeprintf" system You can put args anywhere on the line, not just at the end. This is handy when you get really long printfs going, and makes it easier to copy-paste and rearrange. Similarly you can put format strings anywhere on the line, which is handy when you have a long printf set up and you want to just add something on the end. Does automatic type deduction and output of types that are not explicitly qualified in the format string. In particular a handy one is (size_t) which is not properly supported in a cross-platform way. Any type that doesn't have a % format thingy provided by the caller gets an automatic one. Supports non-basic types in a clean template overriding way. So things like that line that pass a String() as an argument - you will get a compile error if you haven't made a compatible template for that type, or if you have you get nice autoconversion. Basically all the advantages of the C++ iostream << dealy but without the horribleness of having to do your printing that way. I'm gonna clean up the code a bit and try to extricate it from cblib (meh or maybe not) and I'll post it in a few days. It does pretty much everything I've always wanted from a printf. There is one thing missing, which is formatting for arbitrary types. Currently you can only format the basic types, and the non-basic types go through a different system. eg. you can either do : autoprintf("hello %5d ",anInt); or autoprintf("hello ",(size_t)anInt); but you can't yet do autoprintf("hello %5",(size_t)anInt); (note that the type specifier is left off, only format specifiers are on the %). I know how to make this work, but it makes the implementation a lot more complicated, so I might punt on it. The more complicated version is to be able to pass through the format spec into the templated converter. For example, you might have a ToString() for your Vec3 type which makes output like ("{%f,%f,%f}",x,y,z) . With the current system you can do : Vec3 v; autoprintf("v = ",v); and it will call your ToString, but it would be groovy if you could do : Vec3 v; autoprintf("v = %.1",v); as well and have that format apply to the conversion for the type. But that's probably more complication than I want to get into. Another thing that might be nice is to have an explicit "%a" or something for auto-typed, so you can use them at the end like normal printf args. eg : autoprintf("hello %d %a %f\n", 3, String("what"), 7.5f );