[Python-Dev] Status regarding Old vs. Advanced String Formating (original) (raw)

Gregory P. Smith greg at krypto.org
Fri Feb 24 22:56:44 CET 2012

On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 1:52 PM, Tshepang Lekhonkhobe <tshepang at gmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 23:39, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:

It is a burden for some people to learn and remember the exact details of both systems and exactly how they differ. Having both in the stdlib hurts readability for such people. I would prefer that the stdlib only used {} formatting or if not that, that it only used the simple, hard-to-forget forms of % formatting (%s, %d, %f, without elaboration).

If that issue was getting serious, I would prefer if the .format method was deprecated, and only % formatting was kept. Why is that? Isn't .format regarded superior? Or is this just a matter of taste?

It has superior features, but its current implementation is much slower and there is a HUGE body of existing code that would need conversion (a lot of that is automatable), including most uses of the logging module. % formatting is also familiar to anyone who uses C and C++ on a regular basis.

as martin said, both will exist for a long time.

-gps

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