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The short answer is that it does, but not very tidily - by turning the socket object into a file object, I lose the original socket object functionality (for example, shutdown()).

You can just keep the socket around though.

Yes. Which has always struck me as slightly ugly.

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At another level, the concept of a "file-like" object is a very common python idiom - socket is the odd one out these days.

It's really not a big deal - we could regularise the interface at the cost of more implementation complexity.

I'm not sure if I'd call that regularizing. It would by necessity become some kind of odd mixture.

I guess you would keep the send() and recv() interfaces for raw access, and add read(), write(), readlines(), etc, which would be buffered. I'd chose to then view it as a superset of a file-like object.

In any case, I find the file abstraction a bit arcane too. Maybe we should strive to replace all these with something better in Python 3.0, to be prototyped in the standard library starting with 2.4.

And get rid of stdio along the way, with any luck... 8-) It would also be nice to make the buffering play nicely with select()/poll()-threaded applications... if we're talking about wishlists... 8-) -- Andrew McNamara, Senior Developer, Object Craft http://www.object-craft.com.au/