[Python-Dev] str object going in Py3K
Alex Martelli
aleaxit at gmail.com
Thu Feb 16 06:59:55 CET 2006
On Feb 15, 2006, at 9:51 AM, Barry Warsaw wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-02-15 at 09:17 -0800, Guido van Rossum wrote:
>
>> Regarding open vs. opentext, I'm still not sure. I don't want to
>> generalize from the openbytes precedent to openstr or openunicode
>> (especially since the former is wrong in 2.x and the latter is wrong
>> in 3.0). I'm tempting to hold out for open() since it's most
>> compatible.
>
> If we go with two functions, I'd much rather hang them off of the file
> type object then add two new builtins. I really do think file.bytes()
> and file.text() (a.k.a. open.bytes() and open.text()) is better than
> opentext() or openbytes().
I agree, or, MAL's idea of bytes.open() and unicode.open() is also
good. My fondest dream is that we do NOT have an 'open' builtin
which has proven to be very error-prone when used in Windows by
newbies (as evidenced by beginner errors as seen on c.l.py, the
python-help lists, and other venues) -- defaulting 'open' to text is
errorprone, defaulting it to binary doesn't seem the greatest idea
either, principle "when in doubt, resist the temptation to guess"
strongly suggests not having 'open' as a built-in at all. (And
namemangling into openthis and openthat seems less Pythonic to me
than exploiting namespaces by making structured names, either
this.open and that.open or open.this and open.that). IOW, I entirely
agree with Barry and Marc Andre.
Alex
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