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The print must have been the easiest function of them all to convert automatically with 2to3 since in py2 it's a language keyword, it's not possible to assign i

by Too 11y ago

The print must have been the easiest function of them all to convert automatically with 2to3 since in py2 it's a language keyword, it's not possible to assign it to a variable, you can't construct it with strings to __dict__ lookups or any other types of dynamic programming hacks. If people can't even convert print then the migration is quite a lost case. Second of all it's such a silly syntactic difference that if people are honestly bothered enough by it to stay on python 2 i just lost all hope for that community. Besides, the reason for changing it was not vanity with syntax, it was to move it from a language keyword into a standard function so it could be used in all the ways described above, marvys links describe this better.

alextgordon 11y ago
After you run 2to3, you still have to go through the changes and manually audit them for correctness. Since pretty much everything has at least one print statement, its removal ensured that everything had to be converted. If Guido&co had tried to maintain backwards compatibility, they could have more easily made the important semantic changes (like unicode strings). Users would have been enthusiastic to upgrade, instead of angry that their time and money was being wasted on irrelevant syntax details.
- Too 11y ago
  If everything has at least one print statement you are doing it wrong. Functions in modules should return data, it is then the task of the view to present this data, which could be as simple as printing it or could involve rendering it to html, pdf, a gui, sending an email or whatever. People know that global variables are a bad thing but fail to realize that print "foo" is essentially equivalent to global_variable_output_buffer+="foo". It simply shouldn't be scattered around everywhere. This is not just academic nonsense, I was once given the task to parallelize the code in a large python code base, and to send the output in an email instead of printing to console. It would have been an easy job but a lot of the code was using print just the way you describe it causing intermingled output in the console when run in parallel.

by Too 11y ago

alextgordon 11y ago

After you run 2to3, you still have to go through the changes and manually audit them for correctness. Since pretty much everything has at least one print statement, its removal ensured that everything had to be converted. If Guido&co had tried to maintain backwards compatibility, they could have more easily made the important semantic changes (like unicode strings). Users would have been enthusiastic to upgrade, instead of angry that their time and money was being wasted on irrelevant syntax details.

Too 11y ago
If everything has at least one print statement you are doing it wrong. Functions in modules should return data, it is then the task of the view to present this data, which could be as simple as printing it or could involve rendering it to html, pdf, a gui, sending an email or whatever. People know that global variables are a bad thing but fail to realize that print "foo" is essentially equivalent to global_variable_output_buffer+="foo". It simply shouldn't be scattered around everywhere. This is not just academic nonsense, I was once given the task to parallelize the code in a large python code base, and to send the output in an email instead of printing to console. It would have been an easy job but a lot of the code was using print just the way you describe it causing intermingled output in the console when run in parallel.