[Python-Dev] Replacement for print in Python 3.0 (original) (raw)

Paul Moore p.f.moore at gmail.com
Thu Sep 1 18:03:55 CEST 2005

On 9/1/05, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:

On Thu, 2005-09-01 at 10:58, Guido van Rossum wrote:

> [Reinhold Birkenfeld] > > You'd have to enclose print arguments in parentheses. Of course, the "trailing > > comma" form would be lost. > > And good riddance! The print statement harks back to ABC and even > (unvisual) Basic. Out with it! I have to strongly disagree. The print statement is simple, easy to understand, and easy to use.

I agree with Barry. In particular, the behaviour of adding spaces between items is something I find very useful, and it's missing from the functional forms.

print greeting, name

feels much more natural to me than

write(greeting, " ", name)

or writef("%s %s", greeting, name)

And that's even worse if the original used a literal "Hello", and only later migrated to a variable greeting - remembering to get the spaces in the right place is a pain:

print "Hello", name  ==> print greeting, name
write("Hello ", name) ==> write(greeting, name) # oops, forgot the space

or write(greeting, " ", name) # non-obvious translation

OK, it's a minor thing, but what's the benefit?

I've used print functions a lot in things like VBScript and Javascript, and hated them every time...

Paul.

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