Terry Reedy wrote:
I agree. My impression was that format() was added mostly for consistency with the policy of having a 'public' interface to special methods, and that .__format__ was added to support str.format. Hence, any new capability of .__format__ must be accessible from format strings with replacement fields.
format() was also added because the PEP 3101 syntax is pretty heavyweight when it comes to formatting a single value: "%.2f" % (x) and "{0:.2f}".format(x) Being able to write format(".2f", x) instead meant dropping 4 characters (now 3 with str.format autonumbering) over the latter option. Agreed that any solution in this area needs to help with str.format() and not just format() though. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia ---------------------------------------------------------------