Greg Ewing wrote:
On 30/01/23 10:41 pm, mutt...@dastardlyhq.com wrote:
What was the point of the upheaval of converting
the print command in python 2 into a function in python 3 if as a
function
print() doesn't return anything useful?
It was made a function because there's no good reason for it
to have special syntax in the language.
I think I saw somewhere that making print a function also had something
to do with being able to add extra keyword arguments like sep and end.
The syntax for printing to a specific file already seemed a bit odd with
the print statement, and adding extra arguments would have made it even
more clunky (yeah, I know ">>" is similar to C++ streams, but it looks
out of place in Python).
They couldn't fully make the change from print statement to print
function without breaking backward compatibility for existing code. But
there were other breaking changes being made in Python 3 anyway, so may
as well sort print out while at it and have all the breaking changes at
once.
Functions don't need to return things to justify their existence,
and in fact the usual convention is that functions whose purpose
is to have an effect just return None.
--
Mark.
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