Why do Ruby and Python have the % for formatting instead of "format"

I mean what makes % look so much attractive compared to good old 开发者_运维问答.format?!

I know this may be subjective, but I wonder if there is something about this.

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They inherit them from C. Specifically, sprintf.

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I'd assume they use % because that's what the old C printf format strings looked like.

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It's just a piece of syntactic sugar, meant to make a common operation more terse. If you don't like it, you can use str.format() instead. I enjoy it because it makes printf()-style formatting stand out in the code.