[Web-SIG] Re: Bill's comments on WSGI draft 1.4

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 09:44 AM 9/6/04 -0700, tony at lownds.com wrote:

>But using a file object as an iterable is going to give terrible
>performance, and fileno() isn't good enough for Jython and IronPython. I
>don't see why allowing a file-like object is unreasonable.

Because explicit is better than implicit.  Returning a "file-like" object 
can mean, "read all the data and send it as one block", or "read the data 
in arbitrary-size blocks and send them".  The application should say what 
it means!  Either:

     return [filelike.read()]

or:
     yield filelike.read()

or:
     return iter(lambda: filelike.read(bufsize), '')

or something else, according to the results it intends.  The server 
shouldn't have to *guess* which of these is meant.