On Tuesday, June 26, 2012 1:34:03 AM UTC-5, Stefan Behnel wrote: > First of all, the statement has a rather special syntax that is not obvious > and practically non-extensible. It also has hidden semantics that are hard > to explain and mixes formatting with output - soft-space, anyone? > > The function is straight forward, configurable, does one thing, works with > help() and doesn't get in the way. And something as rarely[1] used as a > print simply doesn't deserve special syntax. Oh, and, yes, you can even > pass it into some code as callback, although I rarely had a need for that. > > Stefan > > > [1] Seriously, it's not very helpful in interactive mode and too simplistic > to be used in application code. Even scripts often work better with logging > than with prints.
Unfortunately, even though "print" is supposedly only used by the neophytes, the python<3.0 stdlib is full of print statements. For instance, out of 3173 files, 986 contained the word "print"[1]. Heck just in the Lib folder alone (without recusing down sub directories) there are 1352 instances of "print" in a "py" file! Naive Nancy Mused: "If only neophtes use print, and the Python Lib is full of prints statements, then the python developers must be...OH DEAR GAWD!" [1] of course that is when using `filestr.count("print")` -- I assume that the word "print" is not used excessively in comments or docstrings. Someone else can do a less naive search if they like. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list