Home Original page

question about input() and/or raw_input()

Rustom Mody rustompmody at gmail.com
Sat Jan 18 23:43:39 EST 2014 
On Sunday, January 19, 2014 9:51:36 AM UTC+5:30, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 19, 2014 at 3:15 PM, Rustom Mody  wrote:
> > On Sunday, January 19, 2014 12:00:20 AM UTC+5:30, Roy Smith wrote:
> >> Pardon me for being cynical, but in the entire history of the universe,
> >> has anybody ever used input()/raw_input() for anything other than a
> >> homework problem?
> > Similar 'cynicism' regarding print would be salutary for producing better programmers
> > [If youve taught programming and had to deal with code strewn with prints...]

> Why, exactly? How ought a program to produce filterable output?

Because these two pieces of code

>>> def foo(x): print x+1

>>> def bar(x): return x+1

look identical (to a beginner at least)

>>> foo(3)
4
>>> bar(3)
4
>>> 

And so if they see prints used cavalierly for demo purposes, they think the
prints are also ok for production.

As a professional programmer, you would of course understand
- 'normal' code that does some processing and then some output should not 
have prints in the processing
- web-serving (type of) code that has little other than heavy-duty printing
should probably use a template engine of some sort

In any case prints all over is a code-smell
exacerbated by the way that manuals/examples need to be written
More information about the Python-list mailing list