On Sat, Jul 19, 2014 at 12:24 PM, Mark Lawrence <breamore...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote: > Besides that I wouldn't write the function on one line, the first. Once you > return your data you can do what you want with it. The second you can only > write by default to stdout. The third is really horrible in my book, YMMV.
I agree. Optional flags that alter the behavior of functions are considered unpythonic; usually it's better to let the alternative behavior have its own function, particularly if they can share implementation. With that in mind, I would suggest to the OP that you might want to have *two* functions: def format_completed_time(start, end): return "Time completed: " + str(end - start) def print_completed_time(start, end): print(get_completed_time(start, end)) Also notice that I changed the function naming style from mixedCase to lower_case_with_underscores. This is the style recommended for Python by PEP 8, which you should read if you haven't already. http://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/#naming-conventions I also changed the verb from "get" to "format". "get" suggests to me that it will retrieve the completed time as a processable value, not as a part of a formatted string. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list