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[Python-Dev] Replacement for print in Python 3.0

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Tue Sep 6 16:15:23 CEST 2005 
On 9/5/05, tanzer at swing.co.at <tanzer at swing.co.at> wrote:
> Positional arguments remove too much meaning from the template.
> 
> Compare:
> 
>   '$user forgot to frobnicate the $file!\n'
> 
> with
> 
>   '$1 forgot to frobnicate the $2!\n'
> 
> Whenever the template definition and its use are not directly
> adjacent, the template is that much harder to understand (i.e.,
> in the context of translation, one wouldn't see the arguments
> passed to the template).

The operative word being *whenever*. You're thinking of the i18n use
case, where the format string is separated from the arguments. I'm
thinking of the non-i18n use case, where the format isalmost always a
string *literal* adjacent to the arguments. I'm not at all convinced
that we should attempt to find a solution that handles both use cases;
most Python code never needs i18n.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
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