> soo wrote:
> David Van Horn <xxxxxx@cs.uvm.edu> wrote:
>>
>> Seriously, the word "formatting" conveys no information to me.
>
> The word reminds me of a procedure FORMAT.

FORMAT reminds me first of CL format and second of Perl's format, both
of which are very different beasts from this SRFI, most notably because
they handle the formatting and relations between multiple objects as
well as 2D layouts and tabulating (leaving aside the fact that CL format
is Turing complete).

What this SRFI does is very well described in your abstract:

  This SRFI introduces the FMT procedure that converts any object to a
  string.

So a title like

  "SRFI-54: Converting Objects to Strings"

would seem more appropriate.

I definitely agree that there should be a separate procedure for
numbers.  If you choose radix as the first optional argument it can in
fact be an extended version of NUMBER->STRING.  I think Paul Schlie gave
the most comprehensive list of number aspects here:

  http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-48/mail-archive/msg00031.html

of which you're currently missing sign (which should allow for the
parentheses form used in finance) and commas.

The other procedure could be OBJECT->STRING, ->STRING, or just STR (same
length!) if you want something short.

I also agree <show> should be allowed to be any procedure of two
arguments (object and port).  If not, it should be omitted and just use
DISPLAY - users can write objects to string ports before passing them to
OBJECT->STRING if they need to override this.

--
Alex