One more:
- Why isn't "rU+" allowed? It's understandable that "+" is not allowed for output, but I can't see a good reason why it shouldn't be allowed to open file for read/write, and read with universal support (maybe some implementation detail?). Allowing this would even easy the task, since when writting to the file the programmer could consider the newlines attribute, if he wants.
This is answered by the PEP: """ A partial output implementation, where strings passed to fp.write() would be converted to use fp.newlines as their line terminated but all other output would not is far too surprising, in my view. Because there is no output support for universal newlines there is also no support for a mode "rU+": the surprise factor of the previous paragraph would hold to an even stronger degree. """ --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)