[Python-Dev] PEP 385: the eol-type issue

[Antoine Pitrou]

M.-A. Lemburg <mal <at> egenix.com> writes:
> 
> What I don't understand is why the io layer tries to reinvent
> the wheel here instead of just using the codec's .readline()
> method - which *does* use .splitlines() and has full support
> for all Unicode line break characters (including the CRLF
> combination).

As for the original Python implementation, the goal was probably to start from a
clean sheet. Besides, the new API has seek() and tell() as well. But I'm not
really qualified to say more -- I didn't participate in its design.

As for the C implementation, it had to be written from scratch anyway --
codecs.open() is pure Python and too slow. Deferring to str.splitlines() would
still have been possible but a bit wasteful since in C you can use buffers
directly.

(and, besides, when writing the C implementation we were concerned with exact
compatibility with the Python version -- including line break semantics)

Regards

Antoine.