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Comment by zephjc | Hacker News Reader

no trailing space is a convenient shorthand - print by itself prints with a newline (so it might make sense to have print() vs println()); print + comma omits the newline and waits for the next print statement, so that

    print 'hi',
    do_something()
    print 'there'

and

    print 'hi', 'there'

both yield

    hi there

(Assuming do_something() doesn't call print itself)

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FWIW:

    pprint = functools.partial(print, end=' ')
    pprint('hi')
    do_something()
    print('there')

    print('hi', 'there', sep=' ')

I appreciate the fine grained control, and the ability to do things like `functools.partial` on it.

    fprint = functools.partial(print, file='/var/log/foo.log')
    fprint("I'm writing to a file!")
    fprint("So am I")

I understand this, but couldn't you simply wrap print itself in a function, and do that in Python 2.7 already? Granted, your method saves you one line and it's more 'natural'.

Not really, since the Python 2 version is a keyword, and not a function, you can't simply provide keyword arguments to it. You would instead have to build up a string and eval it. It would have to be something like this (completely untested):

    def print_wrapper(*args, **kwargs)
        outfile = None
        print_stmt = "print "
        if 'file' in kwargs:
            outfile = open(kwargs['file'], 'a')
            print_stmt += '>>outfile '
        print_stmt += ", ".join(*args)
        if 'end' in kwargs and kwargs['end'] == ' ':
            print_stmt += ','
        eval(print_stmt)
        if outfile is not None: outfile.close()

sep and other end values for anything other than ' ' would not be possible.

http://docs.python.org/2.6/reference/simple_stmts.html#the-p...

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