PEP 259: Omit printing newline after newline

[John Roth]

"Guido van Rossum" <guido at digicool.com> wrote in message
news:mailman.992290220.14360.python-list at python.org...
> Please comment on the following.  This came up a while ago in
> python-dev and I decided to follow through.  I'm making this a PEP
> because of the risk of breaking code (which everybody on Python-dev
> seemed to think was acceptable).
>
> --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
>
> PEP: 259
> Title: Omit printing newline after newline
> Version: $Revision: 1.1 $
> Author: guido at python.org (Guido van Rossum)
> Status: Draft
> Type: Standards Track
> Python-Version: 2.2
> Created: 11-Jun-2001
> Post-History: 11-Jun-2001

I think not. Let's consider the possibilities. In existing programs, either
the programmer has taken care to remove newlines, or she wants the
current behavior, or she doesn't care enough about the output format
to fix it so it looks right.

The proposed change wouldn't affect case 1. It would change the output
of case 2, and probably wouldn't matter in case 3, other than the
inevitable questions from users about why their output suddenly
changed.

Programmer: We need to install Python 2.8! It's got all these cool features!
PHB. What do we need to do to make it happen?
Programmer: Well, we need to rewrite all thousand scripts because it's got
all these incompatible cool features.
PHB. OK. Rewrite them in Visual Basic.

Corny as the above conversation sounds, I don't know any real world
managers who regard spending staff time fixing something that isn't broken
as adding value to the project.

I grant you that the proposed behavior is "better," for almost all
reasonable
values of the word "better." However, sometimes the downside of making
a change is just too large for the benefit.

John Roth