I was replying to your original post, did not notice you posted something different here. Formatting a string and then either returning it or sending it to stdout (or any other stream) has too much in common. The work is done in the formatting, sending is just an after thought.

In a sense, this is similar to the parentheses and the prefix notation: it can be distracting if you are not used to it, but after a while it becomes very convenient.

And I do not mean to sound snobbish, but you can easily write a couple macros to have different syntax for these two tasks if it really bothers you.