The first function writes to sys.stdout; the second to sys.stderr. When
there is a problem, they write to the real (C level) stdout or stderr;
no exceptions are raised (but a pending exception may be cleared when a
new exception is caught).
Both take a printf-style format string as their first argument followed
by a variable length argument list determined by the format string.
*** WARNING ***
The format should limit the total size of the formatted output string to
1000 bytes. In particular, this means that no unrestricted "%s" formats
should occur; these should be limited using "%.<N>s where <N> is a
decimal number calculated so that <N> plus the maximum size of other
formatted text does not exceed 1000 bytes. Also watch out for "%f",
which can print hundreds of digits for very large numbers.