On Wed, Apr 24, 2002 at 11:23:16PM +0200, Tomasz Zielonka wrote:
> 
> 4) Create mechanism dual to printf, but as far as I understand
>    OCaml's printf, this would require extending typechecker.
> 

No, it does not. Check out Olivier Danvy's paper `Functional Unparsing':

  http://www.brics.dk/RS/98/12/

It describes a very nice way of programming `printf' within ML's type
system. `scanf' could be handled in a similar way. Furthermore, this approach
yields code that is claimed to be more efficient than O'Caml's current
`printf' implementation (because the overhead of interpreting format strings
is lower). Lastly, it scales up to more expressive format directives, such as
a directive for printing a list.

It might be worth adding a module that implements Danvy-style `printf' and
`scanf' to the standard library. Has anyone written such a module already?
Otherwise, I might consider doing it.

-- 
François Pottier
Francois.Pottier@inria.fr
http://pauillac.inria.fr/~fpottier/
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