[Python-3000] print() parameters in py3k

[Fredrik Lundh]

Guido van Rossum wrote:

> Hm. While not as obviously from a different universe as Barry's
> proposal, this still pretty weird, probably at least from a different
> planet (much farther than Iceland anyway :-)

it's inspired by

    http://online.effbot.org/2006_11_01_archive.htm#et-builder

which owes a lot to

    http://www.tothink.com/python/ElementBuilder/

which is inspired by

    http://effbot.org/zone/idea-xml-literal.htm

which you found "interesting in a futuristic kind of way" at the time ;-),
and which is probably influenced by

    http://okmij.org/ftp/Scheme/SXML.html

whether or not I was aware of that at the time, and google gives me
around 150,000 hits for "John McCarthy ufo", so I guess that settles
it.

> Treating the first argument differently based on its being of a specific
> type doesn't sound right to me; what if you are handed an object x
> and you decide to print it using print(x), but surreptitiously (or by
> mistake) they hand you a format object?

it'll fail in some way (exactly how remains to be defined), but at least it'll fail
more consistently and reliably than if you accidentally do

    printf(value)

on a string value (see Adam's post at the top of this subthread).  a failure caused
by the wrong type is easier to handle than a failure caused by using the right type,
but the wrong value.

(functions that needs to print arbitrary objects in a safe fashion cannot really use
a bare "print" anyway, of course.)

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