Thanks so much for taking the time to answer. All of your suggestions have their places, except possibly the horror that is the 3rd code pattern with all of the Replace calls. Burn it with fire! 🙂
Moving past all of the "is it plugged in?" suggestions - I didn't ask how to fake string interpolation, after all - I guess what I'm really trying to figure out is whether BrightScript is a living, evolving language that improves over time? Like... I won't waste your time or mine suggesting that a spread operator or object destructuring would be really useful if the goal is to keep the language static and unchanging. I'm not a zealot... there's plenty of reasons to keep things hyper-conservative on an embedded device. It's also true that, while I've implemented simple language grammar parsers and can guess at how BRS is working behind the scenes, I truly have no idea what's hard and what's impossible. (I assume that everything worth doing starts at hard.)
So... does your team take suggestions? Is there a voting mechanism for things active devs would love to see arrive in OS updates? One system I've used on OSS projects in the past is to give everyone a small number of votes for requests, and if the request is implemented, they get the vote back.
