Re: [Gretl-devel] printf poll?

On Tue, 20 Sep 2016, Sven Schreiber wrote: I agree, and sorry I wasn't clearer. The idea behind my "poll" was not to ask, Should we replace printf with something else? but rather, Do we need to provide an alternative to printf for formatted output? We may not be able to reach consensus on this, but let me try a little further. At present we have three commands in this neighbourhood: print, printf and eval. Some might say that's already too many (though actually I wouldn't agree, for reasons I've tried to explain up-thread). However, surely it ought to be enough! And in particular, I really don't want to introduce into hansl a "competitor" to printf -- because, as I've already said, I think that printf is the better design for complex mixtures of text and numerics (though of course everyone doesn't have to agree with me on that). That said, I can see a case for making it easier to output very simple stuff such as a string followed by a scalar on the same line. In git there's an experiment to this effect; here's an example: <hansl> set echo off set messages off answer = 42 print "The number of roads a man must walk down is " -n eval answer </hansl> The option -n (long form "--no-break") tells "print" not to add a line-break; therefore the "eval" output follows directly: <output> The number of roads a man must walk down is 42 </output> I don't know if anyone will consider this worthwhile. Certainly, one can imagine a command that would produce the same effect with a single line of input -- but, trust me, that would have to a new, fourth, printing command; it could not be "print," on pain of throwing away its facility to print the values of as many variables as you like, given just their space-separated names. Allin