Frans Englich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Nah, I don't think it's a function, but rather a builtin "statement". But > it's possible to invoke it as an function; print( "test" ) works fine.
That's not calling it as a function. The parens in this case are simply evaluated as grouping operators around the string literal. > 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. 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 :-) > The reason I thinks about this is I need to implement a debug print for my > program; very simple, a function/print statement that conditionally prints > its message whether a bool is true. Not overly complex. You can certainly define a function which conditionally calls print, you just can't call it "print", because that's a reserved word. But, before you get too far down that path, you might want to explore the logging module. It suffers from a bit of kitchen-sink syndrome, so it may be more complicated than you want to deal with, but it's worth taking a look at. You may discover that what you want to do is already done for you. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
