Can someone explain this unexpected raw_input behavior?

[Mike Kent]

Gabriel, thank you for clarifying the source of this behavior.  Still,
I'm surprised it would be hard-coded into Python.  Consider an
interactive program, that asks the user several questions, and
displays paragraphs of information based on those questions.  The
paragraphs are output using print, and the questions are asked via
raw_input. You want to do some simple debugging of the program by
printing some debugging statements via 'print >>sys.stderr', and you
don't want the debug output mixed in with the normal output on the
screen, so you try to route the debugging output to a file by adding
'2>filename' to the end of the command line.

Unfortunately, you will no longer see any of the questions being
printed via raw_input.  The rest of the output will be fine, but the
questions disappear.  Your program just stops, without asking
anything... you have to guess what should be there.

I'm surprised that Python hard-codes this behavior without giving the
programmer any way to change it.  It leaves me with two options: to
either always use the logging module for debugging messages (which is
not odious at all, it's just that the code in question predates the
logging module, which is why debugging was done as it is), or change
the program so that raw_input is never used with a prompt parameter;
the prompt must always be printed separately.

<shrug>  At least I now know I'm not crazy... regarding this, anyway.