gratuitous new features in 2.0

[Amit Patel]

 Guido van Rossum  <guido at beopen.com> wrote:
| 
| About 10 years ago I debated with myself whether to make the most
| basic from of output a function or a statement; basically I was trying
| to decide between "print(item, ...)" and "print item, ...".  I chose
| to make it a statement because printing needs to be taught very early
| on, and is very important in the programs that beginners write.  

I would have preferred either of:

  1. Function calls don't require ().  (ML!!)

     print a, b, c

     would be a call to a function print with three arguments.

    
  2. Simple statements like print and exit are user-defined,
     so you might define

     statement print *args:
         for a in args: 
             sys.stdout.write(str(a))
             sys.stdout.write(' ')

I admit that beginners need to have some easy way to print.  I just
don't like it being a special case solution, because I'd like to have
my own print-like syntax!  I guess I'm a Schemer at heart.  ;-)

	- Amit
-- 
--
Amit J Patel, Computer Science Department, Stanford University
http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/