What is Expressiveness in a Computer Language

[Darren New]

Matthias Blume wrote:
> Very good statically typed versions of printf exist.  See, e.g.,
> Danvy's unparsing combinators.

That seems to ignore the fact that the pattern is a string, which means 
that printf's first argument in Danvy's mechanism has to be a literal. 
You can't read the printf format from a configuration file (for example) 
to support separate languages. It doesn't look like the version of 
printf that can print its arguments in an order different from the order 
provided in the argument list is supported either; something like "%3$d" 
or some such.

Second, what's the type of the argument that printf, sprintf, fprintf, 
kprintf, etc all pass to the subroutine that actually does the 
formatting? (Called vprintf, I think?)

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     My Bath Fu is strong, as I have
     studied under the Showerin' Monks.