gratuitous new features in 2.0

[Joshua Macy]

Robin Becker wrote:
> 
> As Tim Peters seems to like having the generality of an argument to the
> print statement why can't we discuss this? Can I do
> 
>         print >> dingo, items....
> 
> where dingo has a write method (perhaps a StringIO instance)?
> 
> How about print >> (dingo, dongo, dango), items.....
> 
> Why do we need the first comma?

  I presume because print already expects a comma-seperated list of
items.  Why is it so important to remove the comma that Guido et al need
to rewrite that portion of the parser?


>  Why no discussion about which operator
> was to be overloaded. It seems to me that
> 
>         print 1>>x, thing
>         print  >>x, thing
> are now very close typing wise, but semantically miles apart.
> 

  So are x = 1 and x == 1, but that doesn't seem to bother anyone except
the people who want to make them equivalent (so they can have their if
target = expression: do something with target constructs).

> I personally would prefer
> 
>         print to filetypething items,......
> 
> but no vote is to be taken on this. Perhaps the glorious leadership is
> becoming dicatorial.

  The leadership has always been dictatorial.  They don't call Guido the
"benevolent dictator for life" for nothing, you know.

  Personally I think it's a good thing that print is going to grow some
usefulness.  The reassignment of stdout just to be able to use a print
statement always struck me as something of a hack, and unPythonic to
boot.  Anyone who wants writing to a file to be part of a method,
instead of a statement, already has that capability and will continue
to, but now print will be equally useful.  I don't know if I would have
selected >> to overloadm but "to" and "in" would also be overloads, and
I can't see a strong reason to prefer one over another.


  Joshua