Josef 'Jupp' Schugt wrote:
> As long as (natural) science is concerned, printf serves its purpose
> very well. What seemingly is missing is a powerful commercial number
> formatting like the one of COBOL.
....
> Comments?
>

This would make an excellent addition and possibly foundation for Ruby 
report writing applications.

As a somewhat related aside, in my own little language, I implement a fixed 
decimal type in addition to float and binary along the same lines of IBM's C 
extension which was submitted to ANSI many years ago.

decimal(15,2) x;

which is equivalent to Cobol's

77 X PIC S(13)V99 COMP-3.

Fixed point decimal is actually present in all the 3xx architectures and has 
proven to be very useful for financial applications.  While this is not 
architecturally optimal for arithmetic on x86, maybe there's some interest 
in a fixed point decimal type as a class library?

--
J. Lambert