Re: Help! Strings -> Numbers

On Wednesday, November 20, 2002, at 01:45  PM, Tanton Gibbs wrote:
>>>      my int $i is formatted('%4x');
>>>      $i = 255;
>>>      print $i;    # prints '00ff';
>>
>> I too don't see much use in the former. The latter puts distance 
>> between the formatting and the thing being formatted and that can't 
>> be good.
>
> In situations such as these where you want a variable printed in a 
> special way, wouldn't it be better to use printf?  Isn't that what it 
> was designed for?

Indeed, if we can't find anything significantly shorter or more obvious 
than scanf/printf, we should drop it and just use those.  For the 
general case, it's unlikely we _will_ find anything.

I'd certainly like a way to easily (1) treat a string as bin/oct/hex, 
and (2) stringify a number to bin/oct/hex, because those are two pretty 
common cases.  I've tried tons of things to get a more general syntax, 
and nothing is really working.  The string interpolation case is the 
most infuriating, because it feels like something that should be easier 
than it currently is:

     using properties?

     my int $i is formatted('%4x') = 255;
     my int $i is hex = 255;
     my int $i = 255 but formatted('%4x');
     my int $i = 255 but hex;

     named unary op?

     my str $s = hex   0xff;  # 'ff'
     my str $s = hex:2 0xff;  # 'ff'
     my str $s = hex:4 0xff;  # '00ff'

     string interpolation? (where we need it most!)

     "\$i is $(sprintf('%04x',$i))"
     "\$i is $($i but formatted('%4x') )"
     "\$i is $($i but hex)"
     "\$i is $(hex $i)"
     "\$i is <hex:$i>"    # a rule-like shorthand for named formats?

Don't know, but I'm not seeing a good solution...  This is one of the 
things Perl4/5 "formats" were meant to help address, but those seem to 
have fallen into disuse.

MikeL