[Python-Dev] Replacement for print in Python 3.0

[Guido van Rossum]

Wow.

With so many people expressing a gut response and not saying what in
the proposal they don't like, it's hard to even start a response. Is
it...

- Going from statement to function?
- Losing the automatically inserted space?
- Having to write more to get a newline appended?
- Losing the name 'print'?

Some responses seemed to have missed (or perhaps for stronger
rhetorical effect intentionally neglected) that I was proposing
builtins in addition to the stream methods, so that all those debug
prints would be just as easy to add as before. And I don't think I
ever said print was only for newbies!

I'd like to be flexible on all points *except* the syntax -- I really
want to get rid of print as a *statement*.

Consider this: if Python *didn't* have a print statement, but it had a
built-in function with the same functionality (including, say, keyword
parameters to suppress the trailing newline or the space between
items); would anyone support a proposal to make it a statement
instead?

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)