My Cut at PEP 259

[Chris Gonnerman]

I have to agree that .softspace is not my favorite thing.  Here's
how I see it:

Right now, given the following code (numbered for later reference):

1)    print "Goodbye", "Gruel",
      print "World"

you get this (with underscores in place of spaces)

2)    Goodbye_Gruel_World

Now try this:

3)    print "Goodbye", "Gruel",
      sys.stdout.write("\n")
      print "World"

and you get this mess:

4)    Goodbye_Gruel
      _World

This generates a couple of messages from newbies each month 
regarding print and raw_input().

Instead, let's imagine throwing out .softspace entirely and
assume a print statement which replaces every comma (except 
after the >>>fileobj construct, if present) with a space and 
adds a newline at the end except when the last token is a comma.
Figure 3's code gives this result:

5)    Goodbye_Gruel_
      World

This, IMHO, is less surprising, and the results of Figure 1's
code is still Figure 2.

Most expert Pythonians, aware of the behavior in Figure 4, 
avoid code like Figure 3 automatically, so this change should
result in very little code breakage.  Newbies will probably 
ask on the list how to get rid of the extra space when they
do this:

6)    print "A prompt:",
      resp = raw_input()

but I doubt this would be more common than the current question
and perhaps easier to explain.

I'm still in favor of print mapping to a __print__() function
of some sort, but this proposal would work either way.