Home Original page

Again: Please hear my plea: print without softspace

Josiah Carlson jcarlson at nospam.uci.edu
Tue Mar 2 01:02:36 EST 2004 
> If a '+' is problematic, it could be some other character. If I use 
> a print statement in a Python program, from my viewpoint, a 
> trailing comma signals suppression of newline and adding a space. 
> In this scenario, a trailing <insert acceptable character here> 
> would suppress the newline but not add a space. There's not much 
> difference there.

The problem is that checking my keyboard, there exists exactly three 
characters without syntactical meanings in Python 2.3; @, $, ?.  None of 
them make /any/ sort of syntactical sense to me in this context. I hope 
that Guido feels the same way.


> Having said all that, I'll add that I don't see this as a big 
> issue, and I don't find it a burden to use an alternative syntax to 
> achieve the same effect. I don't know how to tell if it's a right 
> or wrong thing to do. If it were a feature of the language, I'd 
> probably use it. I've never really understood what it is about the 
> print statement that bothers some people; it's always seemed 
> reasonably useful and reasonably intuitive to me. Maybe every 
> language is destined to have irregular verbs.

I don't know if every language is destined, and I don't find print to be 
all that irregular, or really magical, so it seems like we are on the 
same page.


  - Josiah
More information about the Python-list mailing list