I never really understood the point of StringForm returning a StringForm rather than a String, which was always either irrelevant to me or an annoyance (addressed by ToString). Mathematica 10 introduced TemplateApply, which seems to offer the same functionality (since it can work directly with a string) but returns a String. So my question: are there situations where StringForm remains useful, or should it be abandoned?
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1 Answer
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Note that Message returns StringForm:
Message[mname, e1, e2, …]is printed asStringForm[mess, e1, e2, …]wheremessis the value of the messagemname. Entries of the form`i`in the stringmessare replaced by the correspondingei.
StringForm is a container that keeps the supplied arguments what makes it easy to extract them for the purposes of debugging. TemplateApply is intended for convenient generation of standardized output, not for debugging.
answered Mar 19, 2017 at 12:36
StringFormcan produce results that contain nicely formatted forms of arbitrary mathematica expressions. I dont see how you readily get similar results with string templates. $\endgroup$InsertionFunction->ToString@*StandardForm... which reminds me, I find the default behavior (provided byTextString) to be quite an odd choice for the insertion function. $\endgroup$*Formfunctions in behaviour: it just looks like a string, but the underlying expression has headStringFormand preserves its arguments. The same is true forInputForm,MatrixForm,FullForm, etc. There were lots of changes in v10, maybe this philosophy is changing, perhaps to make Mathematica more like other systems or be more compatible with other systems.ToString@StringForm[...]was common before. The one prominent use of StringForm I know of is in message formatting. $\endgroup$