+-- Xavier Leroy
    | It's a cute trick. One drawback is that the format is not a
    | character string, but needs to be expressed using special
    | functions and infix operators.

    +-- John Prevost
    | It does, however, mean that people can extend the set of patterns
    | that can be used in printf in a more palatable way than the
    | %a mechanism. Especially with neat things like Danvy's "lis"
    | combinator.

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. 

-- Christian

-- 
 Christian Lindig   Technische Universitaet Braunschweig, Germany
                    http://www.cs.tu-bs.de/softech/people/lindig
                    lindig@ips.cs.tu-bs.de