Re: rethinking printf

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From:

Rich Morin

Date:

March 6, 2002 20:59

Subject:

Re: rethinking printf

Message ID:

p05100304b8aca0caa3ca@[192.168.254.205]

At 5:27 PM -0800 3/6/02, Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes wrote:
>>    "The format string is reused as often as necessary
>>     to satisfy the arguments."
>
>Where did you get that?  Not true for Perl or C.

Apparently, when I did a "man printf", I got the one in FreeBSD's Section 1:

>PRINTF(1)               FreeBSD General Commands Manual              PRINTF(1)
>
>NAME
>       printf - formatted output
>
>SYNOPSIS
>       printf format [arguments ...]
>
>DESCRIPTION
>       Printf formats and prints its arguments, after the first, under control
>       of the format.  The format is a character string which contains three
>       types of objects: plain characters, which are simply copied to standard
>       output, character escape sequences which are converted and copied to the
>       standard output, and format specifications, each of which 
>causes printing
>       of the next successive argument.
>
>       The arguments after the first are treated as strings if the 
>corresponding
>       format is either c or s; otherwise it is evaluated as a C constant, with
>       the following extensions:
>
>             o   A leading plus or minus sign is allowed.
>             o   If the leading character is a single or double quote, or not a
>                 digit, plus, or minus sign, the value is the ASCII code of the
>                 next character.
>
>       The format string is reused as often as necessary to satisfy the
>       arguments.  Any extra format specifications are evaluated with zero or
>       the null string.
>  ...

I also think Fortran FORMAT statements acted this way, but it's been 
far too long
for me to remember for sure...  In any case, it seems that it isn't a 
problem...

-r
-- 
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