Coerce that can pay attention to type of operation

[Martin von Loewis]

hzhu at yahoo.com (Huaiyu Zhu) writes:

> Or more generally,
> 
> "%80.2.3.5s" % a  == str(a, 80, 2, 3, 5)

> which could be used to format more complicated objects in a very clean and
> efficient way.

That does not look very clean to me: too much magic. Instead, I'd
write

"%s" % a.str(80,2,3,5)

I.e. I'd rather invoke an explicit function to pass arguments for
fancy formatting.

Regards,
Martin