New format specifiers for string formatting of floats with SI and IEC prefixes

[avylove (Avram Lubkin)]

@mdickinson

there’s a limit to what can reasonably be encoded in the formatting mini-language without it becoming an unmaintainable and complex (not to mention unreadable) mess - IMO, the problem space is just too big to be able to be expressed clearly in the mini-language. The best that the mini-language can hope to do is to cover common use-cases.

I think that’s what we’re trying to do here, expand the language slightly to cover common use cases. I agree, we will never satisfy every user need, but we can cover the most common and most obvious use cases without adding too much bloat.

There has been a lot of drift in this thread and some changes to the original proposal, but the crux of it is that the current implementation requires programmers to reimplement the same workarounds over and over again. Change is inevitable in a spec based on ~50 year old design. And I don’t think there the changes proposes would hinder the mini-language. We’re mostly talking about one new flag and a few presentation types.