PEP 214 - Why not print >> string?

[Robert Amesz]

Skip Montanaro wrote:

> Robert Amesz wrote:
>
>> But it makes a lot more sense to use a function which does
>> exactly the same as print and returns a string:
>> 
>> def Print(*args):
>>    return " ".join([str(x) for x in args])
>
> Well, more Pythonic it may be, but the semantics of two calls to
> your Print function aren't the same as executing two print
> statements.  The caller would have to insert the required space or
> newline, depending on whether the print statement she isn't
> executing has a trailing comma or not. 

True, this is only for single print statements. For multiple print 
statements you'd need a writable object which behaves like a string. 
Believe it or not, but such objects already exist, in the StringIO and 
cStringIO modules.

So instead of:

   s = ""
   print >> s, "Something"
   print >> s, "Something else"


you'd do:

   import StringIO


   sio = StringIO.StringIO()
   print >> sio, "Something"
   print >> sio, "Something else"
   s = sio.getvalue()
   sio.close()  # or: del sio


Not counting the import statement, that's just two statements more than  
in your proposal. As printing to a string isn't something which would 
be used very often, I'd hardly say it warrants a language change.


Robert Amesz