RE: print with no newline

From: Tim Golden (tim.golden_at_viacom-outdoor.co.uk)
Date: 09/03/04 

To: python-list@python.org
Date: Fri, 3 Sep 2004 16:00:18 +0100

[Jp Calderone]
| Basically, print is only meant to help people new to the
| language get started ;)
| It often does what will make life easiest for someone who is
| just getting into things, but which is otherwise confusing, expected,
| special-casey, or otherwise undesirable. I mean, the whole
| existence of the keyword "print" is an inconsistency, right?
| One could quite reasonably expect print to be a function.

This point of view comes up from time to time on the list
and for the life of me I can't buy into it. Putting aside
the obviously tongue-in-cheek implication that only beginners
would use print, I have almost never found print to be
"confusing... or otherwise undesirable". It does exactly
what I expect it to do with the minimum of syntactic clutter.

If I want something which I consider special-casey, for example
output with no newline, then I know what my options are. And
for the most part that'll be when I'm writing out to a file,
in which case I'm almost certainly using the f.write etc.
methods of the file object.

I would *not* reasonably expect print to be a function. Why
should it be? Certainly any move to remove the print statement
from the language or to replace it by a print function would
get my thumbs-down (or whichever way round the Romans did it).

TJG

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