mem (11/05/82)
c This will probably rile a lot of people, but I'd like to express my opinion that the whole formatted-ASCII-output implementation (that is, all those percent signs and teco-esque things) are out of place in a high level language. The objection I have is the same one that I have against using abbreviations in indirect files and acronyms to excess in documents - saving a few characters is simply not worthwhile except in an interactive environment. I know what you'll say (whoever you are): printf, etc, is NOT a part of the language. But come on, its use is practically religious. Having said that, perhaps I should go and hide. Hmm, on second thought, I'm hiding already. Mark E. Mallett
mn (11/05/82)
Mark said: "... the whole formatted-ASCII-output implementation (that is, all those percent signs and teco-esque things) are out of place in a high level language." According to Kerninghan and Ritchie in "The C Programming Language" page ix paragraph 1 "... C is not a very high level language...". Even with all it's idiosyncrasies printf and its variants (fprintf, and sprintf) are a lot more useful than PRINT in BASIC and WRITELN in Pascal. Mark Nettleingham