[cctbxbb] show() not __str__ - why?

[Graeme.Winter@Diamond.ac.uk]

Folks,


Came up in conversation - how come the motif for printing / providing object info is to call show() and pass a file handle rather than the more pythonic __str__?


See e.g.


https://github.com/dials/dials/blob/b499c6191caa18e04ddaf190321a3da6c14af559/command_line/show.py#L203


I know in dials we could do it differently however we inherited the motif from cctbx & I am not sure why things work that way - figured there must be a reason...


This is also under discussion under https://github.com/dials/dials/pull/567 but I thought it was worth making sure we knew the reasons why cctbx uses it's own way of doing something...


(also it's quite annoying that printing things will give you say space_group object i.e. much like printing type(object), when you want to see it's contents - like printing j and being told it is an int!)


Thanks Graeme

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