[Tutor] Is defining functions as dummies pythonic?

[Scot W. Stevenson]

Hello there, 

I'm writing a program where I let the user use a "-v" option to decide if he 
wants the output to be verbose. At the beginning, I was putting lots of 
lines such as:

if isverbose:
    print "(Somewhat informative text)"

where "isverbose" is a bool. After a while, this got to be a bore, and I 
rewrote the whole thing by starting with:

if isverbose:
    def verbosize(text=""):
        print text
else:
    def verbosize(text=""):
        pass

and then plastered the whole program with 

verbosize("(Somewhat informative text)")

This works fine, and if I understand the way the lower reaches of Python 
work, it should be faster, since I got rid of a bunch of "if"s and turned 
them into "passes" (which I hope the compiler completely gets rid of.

However, defining functions based on parameters seems to be, well, strange, 
if not downright C-preprocessoresque. Is there any reason _not_ to do things 
this way, or, even better, is there a standard way to handle verbose program 
output I'm just not aware of?

As always, thank you again for the help!
Y, Scot

-- 
                Scot W. Stevenson - Panketal, Germany