Puts

Puts is a commonly used function name in several programming languages for writing to standard output. It is most familiar in C and Ruby. In general, puts prints a textual representation of its arguments and terminates output with a newline.

In C, puts is defined in stdio.h as int puts(const char *str). It writes the string str to stdout followed by a newline. It returns a non-negative value on success and EOF on error. It is intended for simple line-oriented output and does not allow formatting like printf.

In Ruby, puts is a method of the Kernel module, available without qualification. It converts each argument to a string via to_s and writes it to standard output, followed by a newline. When given multiple arguments, each is printed on its own line; when given a single array, each element is printed on a separate line; calling puts with no arguments outputs a single newline.

Differences from other output functions include that puts always appends a newline, unlike Ruby’s print. In C, newline handling depends on the implementation and platform, with text-mode streams often translating newlines. Puts is commonly used for simple debugging messages or user-facing output, while more complex formatting tasks are typically handled by functions such as printf in C or analogous facilities in other languages.