evaluation question

[Thomas Passin]

On 2/10/2023 4:55 PM, Python wrote:
> However, Python's print() function is more analogous to C's printf(),
> which returns the number of characters converted for an entirely
> different reason... It's precisely so that you'll know what the length
> of the string that was converted is.  This is most useful with the
> *snprintf() variants where you're actually concerned about overrunning
> the buffer you've provided for the output string, so you can realloc()
> the buffer if it was indeed too small, but it is also useful in the
> context of, say, a routine to format text according to the size of
> your terminal.  In that context it really has nothing to do with
> blocking I/O or socket behavior.

But none of that applies to the Python print() function. There are no 
buffers to overrun, no reason to know the length of the printed string, 
no re-allocating of a buffer.  It's certainly possible that one might 
want to know the actual physical length of a displayed string - perhaps 
to display it on a graphic - but now we're getting into font metrics and 
such things, and we'll be doing something more active than displaying on 
a terminal via stdout.

I don't know why the print() function doesn't return anything, but I'm 
fine with it. I've never felt that I needed to know.