> We scientists still use these for debugging. We never 'move on' very far > from the tutorial. The salient feature about print statements is that > they live to be put in and commented out 10 minutes later, without some > import being required or other enabling object being around. > > Easy things should be easy. Hard things should be possible. I don't > believe the person who said the trailing comma case mixed up anybody, > not for more than 10 seconds anyway.
Damn right. No, I mean: damn "write" :-). I've used Python for teaching beginner programmers, for quick-hack scripts, for interactive diddling about, for scientific computation, for algorithmic experimentation, for GUI applications. I'd appreciably miss "print" for *all* of these, even the last. (My GUI applications sometimes have bugs. How about yours?) So far as I can see, two arguments against "print" have been proposed. 1. It has some ugly features, like the trailing-comma hack. 2. It's a statement that does something "ordinary" and could be replaced by a function. Against which, we have 3. It's convenient for debugging, interactive use, simple scripts, and various other things. 4. It's beginner-friendly. Now, I'm sure I remember hearing something that was relevant to this. "Pragmatism beats purification"? No, that's not quite it. "Practice beats perfection?" No. Ah yes, I remember: "Practicality beats purity". But, of course, that wasn't talking about Python 3000. :-) -- g _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
