Christian Lindig <lindig@ips.cs.tu-bs.de> writes:

> The suggested functional approach to printf has another possible
> drawback:  when you want to express all the options like "%5.5f"
> possible in C style printf formatting you need a whole bunch of
> functions.  Since OCaml has no overloading a single `float' function
> for floats can not capture them all. 

Yes, but you can still get the formatting features you want by having
both formats that take arguments (like "lit") and also higher-order
formats (for example, a format which truncates whatever format it is
given to a specific string length, or a format that right justifies
within a certain length, or etc.)

In fact, the system is more powerful precisely because you can do
things like this to extend the system.  Not only can you do %5.5f, you
could also make something to display the float in binary, or to
display the fraction as a vulgar fraction symbol (i.e. ½).

John.