Hacker News Reader

Comment by mahmud | Hacker News Reader

Heh, job teasers are getting simpler and simpler. I remember in the late 90s they were "compile with GNU/Sun/SGI/HP toolchain, call the phone number that gets printed when you build on a big/small-endian machine".

The early ones were funky C compiler weirdnesses that exploited word size, endianness, binary format and other machine quirks. This one is practically readable.

View on HN

    print "2. Fork out this code, suggest improvements and submit those" [L141]

So fork the code and suggest something funkier.

[L141] http://github.com/praekelt/careers/blob/master/software_engi...

print("2. Fork out this code, suggest improvements and submit those")

There fixed it for you :)

They might be using RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) which comes with Python 2.4 and in 2.4 you can't use print as a function.

LE: python 2.5 -> 2.4 (bconway was right)

Two corrections:

A.) RHEL 5.x (by default) comes with Python 2.4, not 2.5.

B.) Yes you can. It is required in 3.x, though.

Well you can't use it as a function. You can however combine the parsing of the "print" keyword, and the "(" and ")" taking precedence around the string to form KEYWORD STRING that looks a hell of a lot like a function call though.

Actually, print(one single argument) works the same in both Python 2 and 3.

Do you mean as in x = (x) = ((x)) = ...? In this case you're right, although it's still not a function.

true, blame Python :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com