Re: Overloading string literal
On Tuesday, May 21, 2013 10:57:39 AM UTC+1, Gerhard Fiedler wrote:
=EF=BF=BD=EF=BF=BD Tiib wrote:
On Thursday, 16 May 2013 18:06:53 UTC+3, James Kanze wrote:
I suspect that the reason it doesn't make it into the standard is
that there's really no use for them. The native ostream is more
intuitive and easier to use.
People make and use alternatives like 'QString("%1
%2").arg(a).arg(b)' or 'boost::format("%1% %2%") % a % b' so it must
be is attractive and elegant for their taste.
Besides, it's very inconvenient to use std::ostream for
internationalization (the position of embedded runtime values
may change with the output language). You need something like
boost::format to do that nicely.
There's nothing surprising going on here. Things like QString
or boost::format are just imitating something which sounded like
a good idea at the time. (The X/Open extensions to printf.) In
the meantime, those of us who had access to the original and
could actually try to use it realized that it wasn't such a good
idea after all. If you're trying to handle multilingual output,
neither the printf extensions nor any of its imitators help.
The difference between languages goes way beyond the order in
which you embed runtime values: you need to modify words
depending on singular or plural (or dual), or the word order
depends on the actual words, and any number of other issues. In
the end, you have to write a separate DLL for each language, or
you end up compromizing.
--
James