Re: Named parameters to format?

[Mark H Weaver]

Christopher Allan Webber <address@hidden> writes:

> I've been thinking about what I'm going to do once I hit the need for
> gettext support.  I'm not really sure for things that have multiple
> variables in their string.  In python land, I'd do something like:
>
>   gettext("foo %(bar) %(baz)") % {"bar": "bleh",
>                                   "baz": "wonk"}
>
> This would give translators an opportunity to move the right parameters
> to the right place in the string.  However, this appears to not be
> possible in our current format system, because there's no place to put
> keyword based substitutable arguments.  Syntactic word ordering varies
> from natural language to natural language, so...

It's true that (ice-9 format) doesn't provide a way to specify
substitutable arguments by keyword, but it _does_ provide a way to
specify arguments by index.  Search for "Argument jumping" in section
7.10 (Formatted Output) of the Guile manual.  In particular, "address@hidden" 
sets
the argument "pointer" to the first argument (index 0), and more
generally "address@hidden" jumps to argument N.  So, for example:

  scheme@(guile-user)> (format #f "address@hidden and address@hidden" 1 2)
  $1 = "1 and 2"
  scheme@(guile-user)> (format #f "address@hidden and address@hidden" 1 2)
  $2 = "2 and 1"

I agree that this is not very nice, and that we should find a better
solution.

      Mark