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 -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
