shelve implementation

[Robin Becker]

can someone explain why shelve uses StringIO as an intermediate rather
than doing the pickles direct

ie shelve uses
        def __getitem__(self, key):
                f = StringIO(self.dict[key])
                return Unpickler(f).load()

        def __setitem__(self, key, value):
                f = StringIO()
                p = Pickler(f)
                p.dump(value)
                self.dict[key] = f.getvalue()


whereas I would have done
        def __getitem__(self, key):
                return loads(self.dict[key])

        def __setitem__(self, key, value):
                self.dict[key] = dumps(value)

-- 
Robin Becker