08-21-10 - autoprintf

AH HAHA HA ! I think I finally I have the one true printf solution. I can now do :

    autoprintf("hello world\n");
    autoprintf("hello ",7," world\n");
    autoprintf("hello %03d\n",7);
    autoprintf("hello ","world %.1f",3.f,"\n");
    autoprintf("hello %d",3," world %.1f\n",3.f);
    autoprintf("hello ",(size_t)400,"\n");
    autoprintf("hello ",L"unicode is balls"," \n");
    autoprintf("hello ",String("world")," \n");

In particular, all of the following things work :

• Regular old printf stuff works just like always.

• .. except that it does type validation against the format string using my old "safeprintf" system

• You can put args anywhere on the line, not just at the end. This is handy when you get really long printfs going, and makes it easier to copy-paste and rearrange. Similarly you can put format strings anywhere on the line, which is handy when you have a long printf set up and you want to just add something on the end.

• Does automatic type deduction and output of types that are not explicitly qualified in the format string. In particular a handy one is (size_t) which is not properly supported in a cross-platform way. Any type that doesn't have a % format thingy provided by the caller gets an automatic one.

• Supports non-basic types in a clean template overriding way. So things like that line that pass a String() as an argument - you will get a compile error if you haven't made a compatible template for that type, or if you have you get nice autoconversion. Basically all the advantages of the C++ iostream << dealy but without the horribleness of having to do your printing that way.

I'm gonna clean up the code a bit and try to extricate it from cblib (meh or maybe not) and I'll post it in a few days.

It does pretty much everything I've always wanted from a printf. There is one thing missing, which is formatting for arbitrary types. Currently you can only format the basic types, and the non-basic types go through a different system. eg. you can either do :

autoprintf("hello %5d ",anInt); 

or

autoprintf("hello ",(size_t)anInt); 

but you can't yet do

autoprintf("hello %5",(size_t)anInt); 

(note that the type specifier is left off, only format specifiers are on the %). I know how to make this work, but it makes the implementation a lot more complicated, so I might punt on it.

The more complicated version is to be able to pass through the format spec into the templated converter. For example, you might have a ToString() for your Vec3 type which makes output like ("{%f,%f,%f}",x,y,z) . With the current system you can do :

Vec3 v;
autoprintf("v = ",v);

and it will call your ToString, but it would be groovy if you could do :

Vec3 v;
autoprintf("v = %.1",v);

as well and have that format apply to the conversion for the type. But that's probably more complication than I want to get into.

Another thing that might be nice is to have an explicit "%a" or something for auto-typed, so you can use them at the end like normal printf args. eg :

autoprintf("hello %d %a %f\n", 3, String("what"), 7.5f );