this is a bit weird case ... on the one hand you specify %5f and such but that's ignored i.e. becomes %s so why not use %s in the first place then
Actually, this was precisely my intention: to show that one could use the original format string with different formatting requirements (I don't know where that format string is going to come from, if Peter is going to type or if it's going to be inserted by some lower-level function). But I agree that if the user is going to type it himself, he'd better use %s for convenience (Lua is so tolerant anyway).
anyway, originally i used %s but when taco and i played with the converter and did some performance tests we found out that %f is faster (unless > 6 digits specified)
I suppose that when Lua sees a %s format with an argument that is not a string, he calls tostring which must be much slower. Arthur