Totally Confused: Passing variables to functions

[Asun Friere]

Steven Taschuk <staschuk at telusplanet.net> wrote in message news:<mailman.1054919354.7921.python-list at python.org>...
> Quoth Asun Friere:
>   [...]
> > >>>sys.ps1 = '? '; sys.ps2 = '= ' #for those reading news on the web
> 
> Why would those reading news on the web need such a substitution?

My apologies, I should have been more specific in my commenting!  I
read news on Google Groups and (I confess without having looked into
it) it appears that the '>>>' fools the renderer into thinking this a
quoted comment which seems to strip our the following newline.  Eg.
when someone writes:
>>>foo
None
It is displayed as:
>>>foo None
which can be a little bit annoying to read.  Nothing more than that.