Is it considered a reasonable use of IOContext to define a large number of settings that control output in a fine manner? I’m considering settings such as :serialcomma => true, decimalpoint => ".", and similar, and wonder if this is perhaps overloading the capacities of IOContext. If so, what would be a reasonable alternative to express this, while still tying into the Julia output system?
I think the current recommendation here is that if you know exactly how your output should be formatted, it is more sensible to compose your own IO layout using @printf or Formatting.jl or similar to get exactly that output you intended, rather than trying to configure the output via the recursive IO argument.
The issue with that is that you may call a formatting function which in turn calls … a function which prints a number, potentially with separators. How do you pass options to that inner formatting routine? Using the IOContext object seems like a not-completely-insane way to do it, but I haven’t thought it through.