flushing of print statements ending with comma

[Cameron Simpson]

On 29Dec2008 11:11, Grebekel <grebekel at gmail.com> wrote:
| I have recently noticed that print statements ending with a comma are
| not immediately flushed.

I will warn you that neither are the more common uncommaed print
statements, except on a terminal.

| [...] Example:
| <code>
| print 'Take a walk, because this will take a while...',
| i = 0
| while i < 10**10:
|     i += 1
| print "we're done!"
| </code>
| 
| Here the first string is not printed until the second print statement.
[...]
| Using sys.std.flush after the print fixes this issue, but doing so
| each time seems cumbersome and somewhat counterintuitive.
| Is there some reasoning behind this behavior or is it a bug?

It's correct behaviour. The python print etc is layered on the C library
stdio. A stdio stream can be buffered in three standard ways: unbuffered,
line buffered and block buffered.

On UNIX, on a terminal, stdout is normally line buffered: output is
flushed when a newline is encoutered in the data, and this is pleasing
to humans. Conversely, is stdout is _not_ attached to a terminal it
will be block buffered by default; output is only flushed when the
buffer is filled. This is much more _efficient_ in terms of I/O and
program activity.

By contrast, again by default, stderr is normally unbuffered. Being
reserved for error messages, immediate output (before your program
explodes:-) is considered more important than system efficiency.

So you should sys.stdout.flush() if you want data output right now.
For many purposes it is better to let the default behaviour obtain.

Also, I suugest that progress reporting such as your be written to
stderr anyway. It will appear in a timely fashion, and will also thus
not pollute the output stream. Consider:

  your-program >datafile
or
  your-program | process the output data...

Sending your progress reports to stdout puts junk in the data
stream.

Cheers,
-- 
Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au> DoD#743
http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/

Gentle suggestions being those which are written on rocks of less than 5lbs.
        - Tracy Nelson in comp.lang.c