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Comment by tedunangst | Hacker News Reader

Introducing a new format specifier for every typedef will quickly exhaust the alphabet.

In 292 billion years when we overflow a 'long long' time_t humanity is really going to regret that flippant attitude.

I agree, and consider that one of the inherent problems with the string formatter approach to IO. That said, time is perhaps one of the data types that is universal enough and general enough to the C runtime that you could make a case for it.

I've always felt that the 'right' solution was to emulate glibc and provide facilities for registering new format specifiers[1]. Then libraries could provide specifiers for everything that made sense and users could pick and choose.

Of course, there would be performance implications - not to mention the added complexity for implementors.

[1]http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Customizin...

What happens when your graphics library and your network library pick the same letter?

The simplest solution (from the implementor's perspective) is probably to leave it to the user to reassign one. Allowing multiple-letter specifiers helps here. Coming from a C perspective, that's what I would prefer.

You could work out all sorts of namespacing and automatic reassignment schemes, of course.

I can't think of anything without trade-offs off the top of my head (I double that anything exists), but in my (limited) experience it's very workable.

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