[Python-Dev] IO module precisions and exception hierarchy (original) (raw)

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Sun Sep 27 17:32:14 CEST 2009

MRAB <python mrabarnett.plus.com> writes:

If the characters are always the same number of bytes) then overwriting could be possible; that would, however, make the behaviour more complicated (sometimes you can, sometimes you can't), so it's probably just simpler to forbid read+write text streams.

Forbidding them would be gratuitous. There are perfectly safe uses, for example if all writes are appends, or if you use a fixed-size encoding. (and besides, it would break backwards compatibility)

Regards

Antoine.

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