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and to say something FOR noop:
tim_one: "(nobody would write to stdout or stderr
*intending* the output be lost)"

yes, but someone would use print in an application and still
intend this application to run on any platform supported by
python.
its not really intuitive for someone programming under linux
that the print statement may limit the portability.

btw: the microsoft implementations (visual studio) of printf
and cout seem to be noops for non-console applications.
no idea how other windows compilers (mingw?) handle this.

i would consider it best, to make sys.stdout.write a noop
but to provide some other means to inquire the availability
of text output.