Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> writes: > You misunderstand the koan. > > "There should be one way to do it" does not prohibit more than one > way.
Further, that's omitting a very important modifier from the koan. Even without the parenthetical, the koan reads: There should be one obvious way to do it. So yes, there can certainly be multiple ways to do it. But it's very important that there be one *obvious* way. In other words: Don't present the user with a multitude of options with no *obvious* choice for those who don't care (yet) to learn about the choice. Make one of them *obvious* so that's the usually-correct choice. > (Although having multiple redundant ways is discouraged.) The koan > exists to encourage the existence of *at least* one (but preferably > only one) way to do it. And the Pythonic approach is to make an *obvious* way to do it. As you say, ‘print’ is that one obvious way for emitting simple text output. -- \ “What's another word for Thesaurus?” —Steven Wright | `\ | _o__) | Ben Finney -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list