Ruby format strings are like old-style Python format strings. They only map to names or positional arguments. Perl also just maps to positional arguments, like

Ruby format strings are like old-style Python format strings. They only map to names or positional arguments. Perl also just maps to positional arguments, like printf. The most you can do is mess up the string by moving around positional args. JS format strings get evaluated at "compile time", as do Ruby interpolation literals. You cannot have a string with format specifiers in it, you can have a backtick-delimited string literal with format specifiers in it. The formatting is done when the interpreter encounters this literal; the user can't input such a value since these literals aren't a different kind of value. > because it's not realistic Done reasonably often for i18n. Not a good i18n solution, but for many it's good enough :|