Actually, formatting needs to become a function. The overloading of the arithmetic mod operator has proven to be unfortunate (if only because of precedence issues).
For me, it's not so much the precedence, but the fact that "%s" % x doesn't work as expected if x is a tuple; you'd have to write "%s" % (x,) which is tedious.
Right. That too.
Also, the format coding scheme itself needs to be revisited. There is no shortage of people who have taken issue with the trailing s in %(myvar)s.
Maybe the syntax used in the class is the way to go?
string.Template is a bit too simplified. But perhaps it can be adapted. We still want some way to express %r, %6.2f, etc. Since string formatting has been around since Tim was in diapers, we should probably start by looking at the solutions used by other languages. With Py3.0, we have a real opportunity to break-away from doing things the way C does it. Raymond