I'm not sure I understand why format is a macro and print and equivalent in most other programming languages is a regular function. There's some complexity there that I guess I just don't know.
For the second part, Rust should probably add some sugar à la Python f-strings (or just plain old string interpolation dating back to the Bourne shell):
For the second part, Rust should probably add some sugar à la Python f-strings (or just plain old string interpolation dating back to the Bourne shell):
format!("{x}{y}")