On Sat, Jul 30, 2016 at 9:39 PM, Rustom Mody <rustompm...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Saturday, July 30, 2016 at 4:56:01 PM UTC+5:30, Chris Angelico wrote: >> On Sat, Jul 30, 2016 at 8:15 PM, BartC wrote: >> > Anyway, if you're going to talk about annoying things forced upon you by >> > the >> > language, what about: >> > >> > "()" in "print (x)" for Python 3the modulo operator >> >> Why are you singling out print? It's just a function like any other. >> Are you complaining about the way function calls need parentheses? > > Its a function… ok. > Its ‘just’ a function… Arguable > > For example: > > - Prior Art: Its builtin and special in Fortran, Pascal, Basic
And it's not built-in or special in C, or a bunch of other languages. > - More immediate : It was a special in python2 Which resulted in unmitigatable problems, such as that you can't mock it for testing or redirection purposes, and it demands syntactic magic to do its work - for instance, the only option is a "soft space" in place of a newline, where the print function allows full customization of both end= and sep=. The print function is DEFINITELY an improvement. I would also posit that an sprintf() built-in function instead of str.__mod__ would have meant there was less kickback against printf-style formatting, because it wouldn't have had the strange behaviour around single-argument use. (It's pretty simple to write, of course, but built-ins are extremely significant to perception. def sprintf(fmt, *args): return fmt % args) Syntax is NOT always an improvement. > - Poorer error catching: What was a straight syntax error is now a lint-catch > (at best) > [print (x) for x in range(20)] Huh? Aside from the fact that you're constructing a useless list of Nones, what's the error? Also: Why is print special here? Maybe you accidentally called frobnicate on those x's and you shouldn't have. How is Python supposed to know that that's an error? ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
