[Tim, notes that Perl line-at-a-time text mode input runs 3x faster than Python's on his platform]
And much to my surprise, it turns out Perl reads lines a character at a time too! And they do not reimplement stdio. But they do cheat.
[some notes on the cheating and PerlIO api snipped]
The usual *implementation* of these guys is as straight macro substitution to the corresponding C stdio call. It's possible to implement them some other way, but I don't see anything in the source that suggests anyone has done so, except possibly to build it all on AT&T's SFIO lib.
Hmm - speed bonuses not withstanding, an implementation of such a beast in the Python sources would've helped a lot to reduce the ugly hairy gymnastics required to get Python going on Win CE, where (until very recently) there was no concept of most of the things you expect to find in stdio... Brian Lloyd brian@digicool.com Software Engineer 540.371.6909 Digital Creations http://www.digicool.com