[Haskell-cafe] Re: Pure Haskell Printf

[Ben Rudiak-Gould]

Keean Schupke wrote:

 > At the risk of getting off topic... the reason 'C' has printf is because
 > it is not polymorphic. Printf is a hack to allow different types to be
 > printed out, such that they did not need printInt, printFloat etc.

Many language have printf-like functions despite not satisfying this
criterion. Perl, Python, and Common Lisp are the three that come to mind.

I think the reason they have it is that it's useful in general to be able
to visually separate the string template from the expressions being
printed. Even (name++", your age is"++age++".") is pretty punctuation-heavy
for a template. (Plus, it has a bug in it, which would be much easier to
see in the printf syntax.)

-- Ben