Why does using from __future__ import print_function breaks Python2-style print?

Question

I am new at programming with python, and I am trying to print out with a separator and end but it is still giving me a syntax error.

I am using python 2.7.

Here is my code:

from __future__ import print_function 

import sys, os, time 

for x in range(0,10): 

    print x, sep=' ', end='' 

    time.sleep(1)

And here is the error:

$ python2 xy.py 

 File "xy.py", line 5 

 print x, sep=' ', end='' 

           ^ 

SyntaxError: invalid syntax 

$

Answer 1

__future__ statements need to be near the top of the file because they change fundamental things about the language, and so the compiler needs to know about them from the beginning. From the documentation.

from __future__ import print_function 

import sys, os, time 

for x in range(0,10): 

print(x, sep=' ', end='') 

time.sleep(1)