[Python-Dev] Single- vs. Multi-pass iterability

[Greg Ewing]

Oren Tirosh <oren-py-d@hishome.net>:

> A file object is an iterator pretending to be a container. For historical
> reasons it uses 'readline' instead of 'next'

I think it's more complicated than that. If the file
object were to become an object obeying the iterator
protocol, its next() method should really return the
next *byte* of the file. Then you'd still want methods
like read(), readline() etc. for reading in larger
chunks.

Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+
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