Antoine: the desired behavior is to have a function with the same signature as print (so multiple objects to print are supported), but which calls pprint.pformat instead of str.  It lets people monkey-patch builtins.print or somemodule.print with pprint.print and get nicer output.  (I rarely use print these days, as I work in web applications that use logging and responses, but in many other cases people use print and might want a quick way to make it pretty-print.)