[eesmith]

"Readable" is in the eye of the beholder, which is why I commented that this was something I personally found useful, rather than one of the two subtle flaws I mentioned.

I can also disable all print statements with "def print(* args, * * kwargs): pass" at the top of the module.

I've had times where I couldn't figure out where a print was coming from, so I could replace print() to check the arguments passed in:

   import builtins
   builtin_print = builtins.print

   def my_print(*args, **kwargs):
      if "looking for" in args: # adjust as appropriate
         1/0
      return builtin_print(*args, **kwargs)

   builtins.print = my_print

Previously I had to do that by wrapping sys.stdout with my own file-like object, to intercept write(). (Granted, not hard, but harder.)

[Grue3]

The fact that you can overwrite built-in functions is not a point in favor of the language. Imagine you do this in a library and everyone using print() in their project would use a modified print instead. You could've just modified sys.stdout instead.

[eesmith]

Sure, but I never said I was doing this in library code. I mentioned I was using it to track down an unexpected print statement.

And the other example was in module scope.