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[Python-Dev] Hacking print (was: Replacement for print in Python3.0)

Bill Janssen janssen at parc.com
Tue Sep 6 22:01:00 CEST 2005 
Sorry to be confusing.  I hadn't meant to imply that the split between
text and binary files were somehow the fault of any programming
languages, just the split between "write" and "writeln".  Equally bad
ideas with different origins.  Though I continue to believe that Python
should default to opening a file as "binary", not "text", and that the
current default is a defect in Python.

Bill

> Bill Hanssen writes:
> > I think the "-ln"
> > variants made familiar by Pascal and Java were a bad idea, on a par
> > with the notion of a split between "text" and "binary" file opens.
> 
> It's a bit off topic, but it wasn't the languages that introduced the
> difference between "text" and "binary" files. Pascal defined a difference
> between "text" and "record" files because the operating systems of the
> time had two distinct file types. Java initially had only one type
> (binary files which got automagically converted to a stream of unicode
> characters) and later modified things to allow manual control of the
> encoding because "modern" operating systems (like Windows) have two
> distinct file types.
> 
> Don't blame the language designers, blame the OS folks.
> 
> -- Michael Chermside
> 
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