On Wed, 4 Oct 2023 at 13:26, Jonathan Sweemer via Std-Proposals <
std-proposals_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I recently came across P2587 "to_string or not to_string", which has been
> accepted for C++26, and I am wondering whether there has since been any
> attempt to deprecate std::to_string?
>

P2587 was only very recently approved, there hasn't been much time since
then for anything to happen.



>
> The motivation would be to consolidate on std::format, which
> std::to_string is now (as of C++26) defined in terms of, thereby making the
> standard library marginally smaller and easier to teach (in my opinion).
>

std::to_string(1234) seems simpler than std::format("{}", 1234) to me.

And std::to_wstring seems a bit more explicit about what it's creating than
std::format(L"{}", 1234) is.


>
> If this is a stupid idea, then can you kindly inform me of the role that
> std::to_string is intended to play in the language for C++26 and beyond?
>


P2587 notes:
"In addition to fixing the broken behavior for floating point, this
proposal enables an easy and natural extension of std::to_string to other
types via std::format (not proposed in this paper)."

That seems worth exploring to me. We already have to_string overloaded for
stacktraces as well as arithmetic types. I can see some benefit to defining
a generic std::to_string like:

template<formatable<char> T>
string to_string(const T&);

template<formatable<wchar_t> T>
wstring to_wstring(const T&);