[Python-Dev] transitioning from % to {} formatting (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Sat Oct 3 07:24:41 CEST 2009

Raymond Hettinger wrote:

Because there has been limited uptake on {}-formatting (afaict), we still have limited experience with knowing that it is actually better, less error-prone, easier to learn/rember, etc. Outside a handful of people on this list, I have yet to see anyone adopt it as the preferred syntax.

A self-fulfilling prophecy if ever I heard one... uptake is limited because there's a large legacy code base that doesn't use it and many APIs don't support it, so we shouldn't bother trying to increase the number of APIs that do support it?

I'm starting to think that a converter between the two format mini-languages may be the way to go though.

fmt_braces is meant to provide a superset of the capabilites of fmt_percent, so a forward converter shouldn't be too hard. A reverse converter may have to punt with ValueError when it finds things that cannot be expressed in the fmt_percent mini language though.

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan at gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia

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