Using print() (the function version) in Python2.x

Consider the following expressions:

a = ("Hello SO!")a = "Hello SO!"

They're equivalent. In the same way, with a statement:

statement_keyword("foo")statement_keyword "foo"

are also equivalent.

Notice that if you change your print function to:

print("Hello","SO!")

You'll notice a difference between python 2 and python 3. With python 2, the (...,...) is interpteted as a tuple since print is a statement whereas in python 3, it's a function call with multiple arguments.

Therefore, to answer the question at hand, print is evaluated as a statement in python 2.x unless you from __future__ import print_function (introduced in python 2.6)

print("Hello SO!") is evaluated as the statement print ("Hello SO!"), where the argument to the print statement is the expression ("Hello SO!").

This can make a difference if you are printing more than one value; for example print("Hello", "world") will print the 2-element tuple ('Hello', 'world') instead of the two strings "Hello" and "world".

For compatibility with Python 3 use from __future__ import print_function:

>>> print("Hello", "world")('Hello', 'world')>>> from __future__ import print_function>>> print("Hello", "world")Hello world

It is still evaluated as a statement, you are simply printing ("Hello SO!"), which simply evaluates to "Hello SO!" since it is not a tuple (as mentioned by delnan).