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

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Fri Sep 9 17:28:15 CEST 2005

On 9/8/05, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:

Could be. For me, the name "print" is associated with a long history of magical behavior that only a human could possibly feel comfortable with. One of the great sins of Pascal was tarring the name "write" with the same brush!

Well, apart from your personal history, and in the light of future developments, for most people who aren't programmers using dinosaur languages, "print" will probably mean "convert a document to bits of ink on paper" or perhaps by extension into the third dimension "produce a physical object from a virtual one". (I've seen some amazing demos of the latter at foocamp, even though the equipment is still a bit big to fit in a typical kitchen. :)

While I laugh at the naive view of people who write things like "Interface equality and neutrality would be a good thing in the language" and seriously (? I didn't see a smiley) use this argument to plead for not making print() a built-in, I do think that avoiding the 'print' name would be a good thing if it could be done without ticking off the old-timers.

On the third hand, I notice that Java uses read()/write() and class names ending in Stream for a byte-oriented API, and print()/println() with class names ending in Reader/Writer for a text/character-based API. (Some classes provide both print() and write() methods and there the distinction is clearest.) Since Python 3000 is heading in the same direction, I wouldn't mind having some API distinction so it's clearer to the reader whether we are writing binary or or text data.

-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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