Specific functions vs many Arguments vs context dependent

Question

An Example

Suppose we have a text to write and could be converted to \"uppercase or lowercase\", and can be printed \"at left, center or right\".

Specific

Answer 1

I've run into exactly this situation a number of times -- my preference is none of the above, but instead to use a single formatter object. I can supply it with the number of arguments necessary to specify a particular format.

One major advantage of this is that I can create objects that specify logical formats instead of physical formats. This allows, for example, something like:

Format title = {upper_case, centered, bold};
Format body = {lower_case, left, normal};

write(title, "This is the title");
write(body, "This is some plain text");

Decoupling the logical format from the physical format gives you roughly the same kind of capabilities as a style sheet. If you want to change all your titles from italic to bold-face, change your body style from left justified to fully justified, etc., it becomes relatively easy to do that. With your current code, you're likely to end up searching through all your code and examining "by hand" to figure out whether a particular lower-case, left-justified item is body-text that you want to re-format, or a foot-note that you want to leave alone...