[Python-Dev] xreadlines : readlines :: xrange : range

[Tim Peters]

[Guido]
> I bet you it's rejected on the basis of "the docs tell you not to mix
> reading and writing on the same stream without intervening seek or
> flush."  If I were on the support line I would do that.

So would I if I were a typical first-line support idiot <wink>.  But the
*implementers*-- if they ever see it --should be very keen to figure out how
they managed to let the _iobuf get corrupted.  *I'm* not mucking with their
internals, nor doing wild pointer stores, nor anything else sneaky to
subvert their locking protection.  I wasn't even trying to break it.  The
only code reading from or storing into the _iobuf is theirs.  They're
ordinary stdio calls with ordinary arguments, and if *any* sequence of those
can cause internal corruption, they've almost certainly got a problem that
will manifest in other situations too.

Think like an implementer here <0.5 wink>:  they've lost track of how many
characters are in the buffer despite a locking scheme whose purpose is to
prevent that.  If it were my implementation, that would be a top-priority
bug no matter how silly the first program I saw that triggered it.

but-willing-to-let-them-decide-whether-they-care-ly y'rs  - tim