• Charlie (4/4) Apr 21 2005 This abomination needs to be destroyed, or at the very least renamed. W...
• Jarrett Billingsley (4/7) Apr 21 2005 Or, native support for printf just needs to be dropped. writef is a
• Charlie (8/19) Apr 21 2005 Posted too soon, the man pages of printf explain it. ( *nods* to german
• jicman (3/10) Apr 21 2005 Yep! Why use printf when writef is D's best way?
• Stewart Gordon (25/28) Apr 21 2005 Because printf is a C library function.

"Charlie" <charles jwavro.com> writes:

This abomination needs to be destroyed, or at the very least renamed.  Why
not use one of the unnamed letters instead ?  Does this have some meaning
that im not aware of ?

Charlie

"Jarrett Billingsley" <kb3ctd2 yahoo.com> writes:

"Charlie" <charles jwavro.com> wrote in message 
news:d48n49$e2m$1 digitaldaemon.com...
 This abomination needs to be destroyed, or at the very least renamed.  Why
 not use one of the unnamed letters instead ?  Does this have some meaning
 that im not aware of ?

Or, native support for printf just needs to be dropped.  writef is a 
wonderful thing.. 

"Charlie" <charles jwavro.com> writes:

 Or, native support for printf just needs to be dropped.  writef is a
 wonderful thing..

Yea that too.  I see alot of newcomers using printf all over the place.

 Does this have some meaning
 that im not aware of ?


Posted too soon, the man pages of printf explain it.  ( *nods* to german
ben )

Charlie

"Jarrett Billingsley" <kb3ctd2 yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:d48no9$ei6$1 digitaldaemon.com...
 "Charlie" <charles jwavro.com> wrote in message
 news:d48n49$e2m$1 digitaldaemon.com...
 This abomination needs to be destroyed, or at the very least renamed.


Why
 not use one of the unnamed letters instead ?  Does this have some


meaning
 that im not aware of ?

 Or, native support for printf just needs to be dropped.  writef is a
 wonderful thing..

jicman <jicman_member pathlink.com> writes:

Yep!  Why use printf when writef is D's best way?

:-)


Jarrett Billingsley says...
"Charlie" <charles jwavro.com> wrote in message 
news:d48n49$e2m$1 digitaldaemon.com...
 This abomination needs to be destroyed, or at the very least renamed.  Why
 not use one of the unnamed letters instead ?  Does this have some meaning
 that im not aware of ?

Or, native support for printf just needs to be dropped.  writef is a 
wonderful thing.. 

Stewart Gordon <smjg_1998 yahoo.com> writes:

Charlie wrote:
 This abomination needs to be destroyed, or at the very least renamed.
 Why not use one of the unnamed letters instead ?

Because printf is a C library function.

There is a similar, more powerful function in D.  It's called writef.

http://www.digitalmars.com/d/phobos.html#stdio

 Does this have some meaning that im not aware of ?

The notation %.*s takes two pieces of information from the function's 
arguments: the length of the string and a pointer to the beginning of 
its data.  Basically, if you have something in C like

     printf(("%.*s", 10, "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz");

then it'll print the first 10 characters, i.e. 
"abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz".  This is because in C, strings are passed 
as plain pointers.

In D, OTOH, strings have length fields and aren't necessarily null 
terminated.  And so when you pass a D string into printf, you are 
actually passing in both the length and the pointer to the beginning of 
the data.

And so the D statement

     printf(("%.*s", "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz");

is equivalent to the C statement

     printf(("%.*s", 26, "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz");

If you had just "%s" instead of "%.*s", it would try to print the text 
pointed to by the number 26, which obviously isn't going to work.

Stewart.

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