Tag: extensibility

I like Python’s way to format strings because you can use it everywhere, it’s part of the strings. You can do

print("Welcome %s!" % user.name)

as you can do

Console.Writeln("Welcome {0}!", user.Name)

But then in Python you can also do

randomMethodThatTakesAString("Welcome %s!" % user.name)

In C# it gets trickier, because the call to Console.Writeln takes extra arguments for the string arguments, while RandomMethodThatTakesAString doesn’t. It just takes a string. So the only way to go is

RandomMethodThatTakesAString(String.Format("Welcome {0}!", user.Name))

which is ugly.

Thanfully C# 3.0 has extension methods, so I quickly wrote this method:

blah blah

and now I can write:

RandomMethodThatTakesAString("Welcome {0}".Args(user.Name))

which is more verbose that Python’s version, but equally nice in my eyes.

If you can understand why allowing the language to be extendable in one aspect was a win here, then you can understand why so many, me included, love Lisp that is extendable in every possible way.

Reviewed by Daniel Magliola. Thank you!

Update 2009-09-17: For those complaining that I didn’t show how I did it, here is the Args method:

public static class StringExtensions {
    public static string Args(this string str, params object[] args) {
        return String.Format(str, args);
    }
}