[Python-Dev] Simplify the file-like-object interface (Replacement for print in Python 3.0) (original) (raw)

Steven Bethard steven.bethard at gmail.com
Tue Sep 6 23:17:35 CEST 2005

[Greg Ewing]

While we're on the subject, in Py3k I'd like to see readline(), readlines(), etc. removed from file objects and made builtin functions instead. It should only be necessary to implement read() and write() to get a file-like object having equal status with all others.

[Fredrik Lundh]

maybe some variation of

http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0246.html combined with "default adapters" could come in handy here ?

[Paul Moore]

That sounds like a good idea. I'm certainly getting concerned about the proliferation of methods that people "should" add to file-like objects, where read/write are the only fundamental ones needed.

I can't see mixins working, as too many file-like objects are written in C...

I'd also prefer something along the lines of Fredrik's suggestion, but I don't write enough C code to understand Paul's last point. Could someone briefly explain why mixins wouldn't work in C code? I scanned the Python/C API Reference Manual, but all I could find was that, for tp_base "only single inheritance is supported; multiple inheritance require dynamically creating a type object by calling the metatype."[1]

[1] http://docs.python.org/api/type-structs.html#l2h-983

STeVe

You can wordify anything if you just verb it. --- Bucky Katt, Get Fuzzy

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