🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <423cuc$tab@harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au>, 
junaid@silas.cc.monash.edu.au says...
>
>James Kanze US/ESC 60/3/141 #40763 (kanze@lts.sel.alcatel.de) wrote:
>: In article <MATT.95Aug29163934@godzilla.EECS.Berkeley.EDU>
>: matt@godzilla.EECS.Berkeley.EDU (Matt Austern) writes:
>: 
>: |> In article <41vst0$9nb@gap.cco.caltech.edu> 
<lemahieu@paradise.caltech.edu> writes:
>: 
>: |> > I was under the impression that cout and cin for I/O was actually 
_faster_
>: |> > than using printf.  I thought this was because printf must parse
>: |> > the format string each time to determine how the subsequent parameters
>: |> > are to be interpreted and output, whereas this is done at compile time
>: |> > for cout.  The format string is typically constant but must be 
reparsed every
>: |> > time the printf function is called, which doesn't sound very efficient 
to me.
>: 
>: |> There's no reason why printf() has to be implemented like that.  
>: |> Functions in the standard library don't have to be treated as ordinary
>: |> functions: an implementation is free to treat them as (almost) part of 
>: |> the language.  There's nothing wrong with a C++ implementation parsing
>: |> printf's format string at compile time, doing error checking to
>: |> make sure that there aren't any type errors, and putting in the
>: |> appropriate low-level calls.
>: 
>: |> I don't know the names of any implementations that actually do this, but
>: |> I strongly suspect that there are some.
>
>        Well Gcc 2.6.3 will check the formatting spec, and i'm sure
>you could make a small program that converted printf's to lines of
>puts().
>
>: 
>: Actually, I doubt it.  Normally, the format string in production code
>: will not be a string literal, but rather something read from a
>: configuration file, dependant on the locale setting.
>: 
>: Or do you really think everyone in the world can read English
>: fluently.
>
>        This run-time dynamic behaviour is unique to sprintf() and
>friends. There is no way to implement this using cout, becuase the
>implicit formatting specification is unknown at compile time. There
>for C++ streams are in fact more restrictive than the C lib I/O .

About four years ago I wrote an article in The C++ Report showing how to do 
this.