[Nickle] Re: What does "0.{511432343" in Nickle?

[Keith Packard]

Around 9 o'clock on Aug 3, Barton C Massey wrote:

> The curly brace is the start of a repeating decimal that's
> too long to print in full.  There should be a format
> character you can use to stop that, but I don't know that
> there is.

Formats in nickle are kinda a mess.  They follow libc printf (kinda) and some 
require specific argument types.

	s		strings
	d or D		integers in base 10
	b or B		integers in base 2
	o or O		integers in base 8
	x or X		integers in base 16
	e, E, f or F	numbers in base 10 with exponent

A few others exist that don't require specific argument types (!):

	v		any value, print so the lexer could re-read it exactly
	g		any value, print in a "reasonable" format.

The behaviour of any format letter aside from these is undefined (!).

The top level read/eval/print loop uses the 'format' variable to control
how values are displayed.  By default, 'format' is "%g", which (probably
unfortunately) displays rational numbers with the { } brace notation.

Use '%f' if you want to display numbers without the braces.

We could fix 'g' to avoid braces as well; that makes a lot of sense...

-keith


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