What is print? A function?

[Georg Brandl]

Roy Smith wrote:

>> So I wonder, what _is_ exactly the print statement? The untraditional way of 
>> invoking it(without paranteses) makes me wonder.
> 
> It's a statement, just like "write" in Fortran.  When C came around, the 
> idea of a language having no built-in print statement and having to call 
> a function to generate output was "untraditional".  The function was 
> named "printf" (with an "f" at the end) to emphasize that it was a 
> function call, not a built-in language keyword.

I beg to differ. Doesn't 'printf' stand for 'PRINT Formatted string'?

> Java, and many other 
> quasi-C-based languages also use print functions, and this has become so 
> common that people have come to expect it.  It's even a function in 
> Perl, although that language's devil-may-care attitude about punctuation 
> makes it difficult to tell for sure :-)

And it should have been and perhaps will be a function in Python, see
"Python Regrets" by GvR.

Georg