[Python-Dev] str object going in Py3K (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Thu Feb 16 04:06:45 CET 2006

Barry Warsaw wrote:

If we go with two functions, I'd much rather hang them off of the file type object then add two new builtins. I really do think file.bytes() and file.text() (a.k.a. open.bytes() and open.text()) is better than opentext() or openbytes().

I'm worried about feeping creaturism of the file type here. To my mind, the file type already has too many features, and this hinders code that wants to define its own file-like objects.

In 3.0 I'd like to see the file type reduced to having as simple an interface as possible (basically just read/write) and all other stuff (readlines, text codecs, etc.) implemented as wrappers around it.

To be compatible with that model, opentext() etc. need to be factory functions returning the appropriate stack of objects. As such they shouldn't be class methods of any type.

-- Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+ University of Canterbury, | Carpe post meridiam! | Christchurch, New Zealand | (I'm not a morning person.) | greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz +--------------------------------------+

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