On 9/1/05, Barry Warsaw
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.