Re: python strings ( function func_doc strings )

Guido.van.Rossum@cwi.nl
Tue, 03 May 1994 09:21:12 +0200

> Consensus or not, it will be with sadness that I see this being
> changed. I always thought it a feature of the language to print
> expressions with an unassigned return value.

I agree. It WAS a feature. I was very fond of it. I always thought
that it was nice to make people think a little harder about whether
they really WANT to return anything from a function or not, and then
to make the user of the function think a little harder about whether
they want to ignore such a result that the function cared enough about
to return it.

Unfortunately we seem to be a minority. There were two problems with
it: (a) if you happened to call a function thinking it was a
procedure, it would print a value and that would be hard to track
down. Lots of newbies complained about this. (b) Too many have a
thorough dislike of it. Like it or not, I do at least PART of the
current development in Python in order to reduce the stream of
complaints flowing into my mailbox... I'm sure that apart from a few
old-timers like yourself there will be no mail about the loss of this
feature, while it has never stopped generating mail as long as it was
in the language. So I gave in :-)

--Guido van Rossum, CWI, Amsterdam <Guido.van.Rossum@cwi.nl>
URL: <http://www.cwi.nl/cwi/people/Guido.van.Rossum.html>