4 ms·

Curious here, what difference does it make if it's a statement or a function?

• daveguy 10y ago
  4 extra keystrokes. If you could add a statement I would add "p" and change my muscle memory to use that. For me it doesn't even need the ">>" syntax, just quick display. Rapid prototyping needs rapid feedback. Edit: it's not just the quickness of a single statement. It's that the print statements are about 30-50% of the code when you are working this way.
  • patcallier 10y ago
    To be fair we've ingested a fair amount of python 2.7 research code for our Python 3 codebase and the print statements are the quickest of fixes. There are rarer actual gotchas, but 2to3 catches a fair number of them. We only switched for the machine learning project I'm working on right now as an experiment, but it's surprising how smoothly it's gone.
    • daveguy 10y ago
      I'm not talking about it being a bug that needs a fix. That is easy enough in existing code. Im talking about when you are using Python like Matlab or Mathematica. Analyzing data and quickly viewing the results or subsets of the results.
      • ebalit 10y ago
        You should probably use Jupyter notebook if you don't use it already. It's great for exploratory coding like data analysis. And as the last evaluated expression of a code block is automatically printed, no need for a print statement.
  • freyr 10y ago
    I can see how you'd feel that way if 50% of your code is print statements. As a counterpoint, I write Matlab and Python code day in and day out, and print statements are relatively rare in my code. Same for most of my peers. I'm guessing we work in different research domains, but I can't imagine a good scenario where my research productivity becomes limited by how fast I can type print statements.