Combining formatting and output is quite common - C has it in the printf family of functions (some of which do not output into anything, but return a string). S

Combining formatting and output is quite common - C has it in the printf family of functions (some of which do not output into anything, but return a string). Similarly, Java’s output streams have a format method, which can output to whatever, or fill in an array which you can later convert to a string.