Please tell your background/ objectives why you do not want to use the convinient design of printf. Maybe you should have a look at

• Text::Reform
• perlform
• http://pweb.uunet.de/oook.m/perl/tt-mpm/comparison.de.html - Template Systems
• http://perl.apache.org/docs/tutorials/tmpl/comparison/comparison.html - Everything you wanted to know about templating systems and didn't dare to ask. Well, not everything....