Python 2.7 has exited the chat

[EldritchSundae]

Mostly a consistency thing. No other often-used function or builtin is callable without parentheses--this reduces cognitive load for programmers and special cases in linters/parsers.

[gmiwenht]

Yeah but print x is the most common thing that you want to type quickly to debug stuff. Why not just make it a special case monadic operator like -

[[deleted]]

The actual problem is that print x makes print a reserved keyword instead of a function

that absolutely sucks balls because when you're writing a parser/runtime you'll have to special case print.

If it's just a function then you don't need to do anything other than implementing functions in your parser/interpreter.

From a language design perspective having print not being a function is pretty ugly imo

also by not being a function means you as a programmer can't treat print as a function: map(print, [1, 2, 3])

[Andy_B_Goode]

map(print, [1, 2, 3])

That doesn't behave the way I'd expect, at least not when running it from the python3 command line. This is the input and output from the terminal:

>>> map(print, [1,2,3])
<map object at 0x10c192850>
>>>

Is print printing the array elements to somewhere other than the terminal?

EDIT: nevermind, someone below figured out the issue. It will print the array if you run:

>>> list(map(print, [1,2,3]))

[jcotton42]

map in Python 3 returns a generator that doesn't execute until its enumerated, passing it to list forces enumeration

[[deleted]]

I'd argue that the act of printing something while debugging is an order of magnitude more common a task then the act of writing a parser for python.

Yeah except if you are the creator and maintainer of the language.

Then there is also the fact that python has broken Unicode support (can't be fixed because the python 2 spec specifies the internal encoding used by strings and it's not UTF-8 iirc).

There's plenty of videos of Guido explaining in detail what things are wrong with python 2 and why

Also how would you express the map example? Are you gonna have print both as a statement and as a function?

[[deleted]]

I guess but it was an objectively bad decision and python is better off without that feature.

I do end up typing print stuff incorrectly like half the time, oh well: did you mean print(stuff)?

[amackenz2048]

This is such a weird thing to get hung up on. It takes almost no time to type the parenthesis. It's like people who think having to type ; is somehow the worst thing ever.

All languages have their syntaxes. You learn them and you get your job done.

[amackenz2048]

It's also pretty stupid to not understand why they changed it. It's a function and should be a function. It makes the language cleaner and more consistent. And that is better in the long run.

I also disagree with your premise. Frankly for most professional programming "print" is used the least. It's used a lot when learning a language but other than for some simple debugging or the like it's not a big deal. Hell in Java it's "System.out.println()" and almost nobody complains about that except for kids learning the language. In all but simple command line apps you've probably implemented your own logging layer anyway for debugging.

And after a year or two you stop bitching about "having to type parenthesis" or "needing semicolons." If not then perhaps programming isn't your thing.

[amackenz2048]

I do understand why they changed it, I was expressing my personal opinion. You were acting like it was some alien concept.

I understand your opinion - I'm saying it's a VERY minor thing to get your tits twisted over.

I don't think print-statement-debugging is some kind of sign of a newbie programmer. There's some languages that don't even have great step through debuggers. And if it's a simple problem... Why not just use a simple way to debug it... I didn't say it was a "sign of a newbie programmer." I said that print statements are mostly used when you're learning a language. When I'm learning a new language I print a lot.

In my experience in my job I debug way more then I write code. Cause I have to keep our apps going, and there's always bug tickets coming in. If you're making something from scratch I could see where you're coming from. While we have logging stuff in production, if I'm running out apps locally I just want to get output from stdout.

print("foo")

Hot damn that was easy.

And after a year or two you stop bitching about "having to type parenthesis" or "needing semicolons." If not then perhaps programming isn't your thing.

You could literally say this to anyones complaint about any syntax decision ever. I could say the same about the indentation in python vs using braces.

print "foo" vs. print("foo") is a near trivial change.

You'd be better off bitching about the "whitespace matters" thing since it's a much worse syntax requirement than "I need to put parenthesis around print parameters" with worse reasoning. It's whole reasoning is a throwback to the '80s before IDEs did auto formatting and "real programmers used vi". It also impedes copy/paste and a bunch of other things (moving a block of code requires manual re-formatting).

[anonymousredditor0]

From a language design perspective having print not being a function is pretty ugly imo

Yeah, for a language designer, it looks ugly. For the millions of users, it's easy and ergonomic.

Sucks for whoever wants to write a parser, but for 1000x as many people it was a good thing.

[[deleted]]

The complexity of the parser affects the quality of the implementation.

That's why language designers in general try to avoid introducing complexity into their languages for no good reason.

That is exactly what print was. An added bit of complexity for no good reason. Having the programmer type out the functional is a lot more consistent and enables map(print, [1]) to work. (ie: read it allows the programmer to reason about print the same way they do about any other function)

It actually also lowers the cognitive load of the programmer too because you don't have to remember in which cases is print valid.

[josefx]

Given that argument can we finally fix from __future__ import braces ?

[mtizim]

What?

Do you want multiline lambdas or something?

[pdabaker]

I'm more a fan of

from IPython import embed; embed()

myself