Old Man Yells At Cloud

[bartc]

On 17/09/2017 02:09, Steve D'Aprano wrote:
> On Sun, 17 Sep 2017 04:00 am, Stefan Ram wrote:
> 
>> Steve D'Aprano <steve+python at pearwood.info> writes:
>>> "Hi, I've been programming in Python for what seems like days now, and here's
>>> all the things that you guys are doing wrong.
>>
>>    I never ever have written a line of Python 2. I started with
>>    Python 3.6.0. Yet a very frequent mistake of mine is the
>>    imission of parentheses after »print«.
> 
> That's remarkable.
> 
> Do you also forget the parentheses around `len`, and `iter`, and `math.sin()`?
> If not, what's so special about print?

It was thought of as a statement or command, not a function where you 
you give it one value and it returns another.

print() is used for its side-effects; what relevant value does it return?

print can also be used for debugging, when it might be written, deleted 
and added again hundreds of times. So writing all those brackets becomes 
irksome. 'print' needs to be easy to write.

> Javascript (at least the Rhino interpreter, if not others) includes a print
> function. It too requires parentheses:
> 
> js> print 21
> js: "<stdin>", line 5: missing ; before statement
> js: print 21
> js: .......^
> js> print(21)

Javascript I believe uses C-like syntax. C syntax is also fond of 
unnecessary punctuation, and its 'printf' requires a format string full 
of format codes. Even more of a nuisance.

-- 
bartc