Home Original page

PEP 0214 - extended print statement

Martijn Faassen m.faassen at vet.uu.nl
Wed Aug 23 07:45:00 EDT 2000 
Richard Jones <Richard.Jones at fulcrum.com.au> wrote:

> [Barry A. Warsaw]
>> Please be aware that Guido has ruled favorably on PEP 214, the
>> extended print statement.  This feature has been accepted as described
>> in the PEP[1] and is now checked into the Python 2.0 development
>> tree.

> ... Well, I'm stunned ...

Me too; print was already odd with its special treatment of the ',':

print "foo",

And now it's even odder, throwing in a special meaning for >>. I hope that
this kind of syntax extension isn't the trend with Python now.
Suddenly we're directing output with >>, and we never did before.

The writeln() approach seems better, and even better would be to 
attach it to the file class like this:

f.writeln(...)

Though I tend to handle this type of 'write to logfile' thing with a
convenient log object like this:

class Log:
    def __init__(self, f):
        self.f = f 
    def __call__(self, line):
        self.f.write(line)
        self.f.write("\n")

mylog = Log(sys.stdout)
mylog("foo!")

If I need any automatic conversions to strings, I just use % with %s.

Anyway, perhaps this change makes print more useful, but it sure looks
ugly to me.

Regards,

Martijn
-- 
History of the 20th Century: WW1, WW2, WW3?
No, WWW -- Could we be going in the right direction?
More information about the Python-list mailing list