In message "[ruby-talk:00376] Re: Store and load"
    on 99/06/03, Akira Endo <akendo / t3.rim.or.jp> writes:

|It may be much better to have scanf("%d%s", a, b)
|to read, though the need for defining local variables still remains. 

Possible interface of String#scanf() be

  a, b = str.scanf("%d%s")

in Ruby, I think.  scanf has been in my ToDo list for long time.  But
it's too late for 1.4 (feature frozen already for 1.3.x), so we should
wait for 1.5 development cycle.

                                                        matz.