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Comment by joejev | Hacker News Reader

I hear this complaint about print all the time but I have never understood it. Why is print so special that it needs dedicated synta? Most languages don't do this and people don't seem to mind. Also, I almost never physically type print, but I do type a lot of function calls, so if anything I am more accustomed to typing it as a call.

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The print statement is a little more convenient in the REPL. Otherwise there is little to complain about having a more consistent, extensible print without any magic. Every Py2 coder should be sticking in "from __future__ import print_function" to train themselves for the transition.

> The print statement is a little more convenient in the REPL.

IIRC ipython has a feature where you can prepend slash to any function (at the beginning of a line) to have parens inserted automatically, ie.

    In [0]: /print "foo"

is executed as print("foo"). There - problem solved, and for all functions, not just one special case.

Honestly, the crazy `print >>fileobject, "foo"` syntax is enough of a reason for removing it (print statement) from the language. It was unpythonic and I'm surprised it lasted this long in the language.

Yes, I don't like that last usage too. Non-orthogonal syntax is slightly harder to learn / remember, and the more of if there is, the more the cognitive / memory load. Of course, no language can be perfectly orthogonal or regular, though I guess Lisp comes close. (Not an expert on language design or theory.)

> Why is print so special that it needs dedicated synta?

parent answered the question:

> Taking away permissiveness from a programming language just leads to developers not upgrade. No surprises there.

Some people used the print statement because at a time this was the recommended approach. In fact the 2.7 tutorial uses the statement: https://docs.python.org/2.7/tutorial/interpreter.html#intera... print behavior was changed, and combined with the other changes and incompatible modules a lot of people decided not to jump to 3.0.

Since languages like C never had a print statement to begin with -- printf was always a function call -- this issue would never have appeared in the first place.

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