gratuitous new features in 2.0

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi,

> I've been exchanging some e-mail with Guido and Barry about this;
> Guido particularly isn't following the discussion here.
> Unfortunately, I seem to be unable to find a sufficiently powerful
> argument to sway BDFL's mind.

It's a shame Guido's not following the newgroup where disgruntlement
about polluting Python with an overloaded >> in the context of print
keeps popping up.  I didn't realise we all had to make direct
representations to him to state our case.

This seems to be the start of the slippery slope to Perl where there
are many, many, ways to do it and you have to learn that >> means
right-shift, *except*...

There are two problems.  Overloading >> and the comma after the file.
The latter makes it seem like the file is a parameter to print.

    print >>file, filename, age
    print >>file filename, age
    print in file, filename, age
    print in file filename, age

If >> is favoured because of the Bourne shell then you'd think the
comma wouldn't be there.


Ralph.