On Wed, 26 Nov 2003, Felix Winkelmann wrote:

>Hi!
>
>Some comments:
>
>- The reference implementation allows escape sequences in lower- or
>uppercase, but it's not
>   specified whether uppercase escape sequences are case-insensitive.
>- What's the point of ~_ ?
>
>and:
>
>- Why not go the full way and use Dirk Lutzebaecks full CL format
>   (as can be found in SLIB)? It's way more powerful and just as portable.
>

I think I agree that SRFI-48 format strings (effectively borrowed from
C) aren't the best fit for a lispy language.  But there is a space they
serve very well - When combined with the argument position qualifiers,
they allow relatively easy translation of software - where you change
just the format strings, and none of the rest of the code.

As a variation of practice that people have had long experience with
in C, I don't think they're a serious problem.  If the design were
abjectly broken, I/O in C would have more trouble and pain than it
has.

This may not be the best way to do it, but it's a useful library for
portability and translatability.  I don't think it would be the right
thing to build directly into the runtime, because better libraries
for closely related tasks can exist.  But it's still a useful library.

					Bear