printf

[Oliver Kiddle <okiddle@yahoo.co.uk>]

In case anyone was unsure, printf is not entirely finished. I've got a
couple more questions before I do any more on it though.

I have established that the ksh behaviour of -r with -f is not going to
change (they can't be used together). This leaves the possibility of
overloading the -r option to prevent format reuse when combined with
-f. Does anyone have any preference on whether I should overload this
option letter or use a different letter (for which I can't think of a
suitable available letter)?

As Peter suggested a while back, the ideal would be to update
convfloat() and convbase() to be flexible enough to do the outputting.
Currently convfloat() just uses printf(3). Does anyone know of any
established algorithms for converting floats to their ASCII
representations? Or does anyone have any suitable code I could crib? I
expect that something of this sort exists and would be better than
whatever I might re-invent.

I'd like to be able to support the ' (thousand grouping) and I (use
locale format) flags and the a,A,F conversion specifiers. I'd also like
to try to handle this sort of thing better:
    printf '%*s' 100000000 ' ' > /tmp/f
and of course, allow print -f to be used with -s and -z.

Oliver

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