Re: Named parameters to format?

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Mark H Weaver writes:

> 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

Aha, it's very helpful though!  That does solve my need.