The string formatting concept found in sprintf can be found in almost any language today (you know, smothering a string with %s %d %f etc. and providing a list of variables to fill their places).
Which langugage was it originally that had a library function or language construct which offered this functionality?
Please specify some kind of source reference to confirm your claim, so that we avoid pure speculation or guessing.
Regards
Robert
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Wikipedia has a pretty thorough history. It suggests that the C printf function had its origins in BCPL's writef function.
John Rudy : That article is more information than I ever needed to know about it. And a perfect example of why I love Wikipedia: You can find THE most obscure, interesting trivia EVER there ...From Paul Dixon -
I would say all of them trace their roots back to BCPL. We used BCPL to do operating systems programming for the 6809 processor two decades ago and it had a
writef()function which took arguments such as%i2(equivalent to C's%2d).C was based on a cut-down version of BCPL and inherited a similar mechanism for formatting output and I'm pretty certain all other instances picked it up from C after that.
I could be wrong, it won't be the first or last time, but I'm pretty confident that's right, given what I know about the BCPL language and its origins.
From paxdiablo
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