gratuitous new features in 2.0

[Jeremy Hylton]

Roy Katz <katz at Glue.umd.edu> writes:

> *  What was ever wrong with sys.stdout.write('...')?
> if you have a file open, just use its .write() method.  What was ever
> so deficient about that statement as to necessate anything like a >> or a
> 'to' or an 'in' (or any other orderliness-breaking extension of grammar)?

As PEP 214 explains, the print statement has a number of useful
features that are not available to a statement like
sys.stderr.write(...). 

> I believe the question can be summed thusly:  IS extending the grammar
> (and possibly polluting it) worth reaching that extra perl (or
> newbie) programmer? 

The PEP was developed and championed by a seasoned Python programmer
who hasn't used Perl in years and years.  I don't think the intent was
to make Python easier for Perl programmers.  (It's already easy.)

-- Jeremy Hylton <http://www.python.org/~jeremy/>