On 3 January 2014 11:44, Otto Behrens <otto@finworks.biz> wrote:
'Conversion' implies using the resulting String in some further computation. 'Printing' usually implies displaying something to the user (and nothing more), or serialising to a file/network.
What kinds of computation are you thinking of regarding a string? I think I understand what you're saying, I'm just trying to make it a bit more concrete in my mind.
I just mean that sometimes you want to work with a string representation of a thing, and #asString is how you get it. For instance, a Symbol might printString as '#foo' while in its converted form it returns 'foo'.
The requirements of displaying something to the user and serialising to a file/network are quite different, or not?
You're right. I'm wrong in saying that #printString should be used to serialise anything. Actually, you'd probably use #storeString for serialising, if you weren't using Fuel. frank