> What's so special about print? It's just a function.

I'd argue it's a pretty special function given its history. Just because it's used less frequently that something else doesn't mean it's not "special" in some sense. `iter x` never worked, whereas `print x` used to work, which is the only reason I'm giving it special status.

Regardless, I'd rather not have this feature. As you said it's not 100% backwards compatible, so the usefulness is limited.

On Thu, Jun 11, 2020 at 11:49 AM Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:

On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 08:00:26PM -0400, Jonathan Crall wrote:
> I wouldn't mind if this *only *worked for the specific characters "print".

I would. What's so special about print? It's just a function.

I use `iter` much more than print. Should we make a special exception
for only 'iter' too? Or instead?

`print` is especially problematic, because zero-argument form of print
is possible. This makes it a landmine waiting for the unwary:

print x, y, z # works
print x # works
# now print a blank line
print # silent failure

That's especially going to burn people who remember Python 2, where it
did print a blank line instead of evaluating to the `print` object.

--
Steven
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