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[Python-Dev] str object going in Py3K

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Wed Feb 15 19:29:30 CET 2006 
On 2/15/06, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
> Barry Warsaw wrote:
> > On Wed, 2006-02-15 at 18:29 +0100, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
> >
> >> Maybe a weird idea, but why not use static methods on the
> >> bytes and str type objects for this ?!
> >>
> >> E.g. bytes.openfile(...) and unicode.openfile(...) (in 3.0
> >> renamed to str.openfile())
> >
> > That's also not a bad idea, but I'd leave off one or the other of the
> > redudant "open" and "file" parts.  E.g. bytes.open() and unicode.open()
> > seem fine to me (we all know what 'open' means, right? :).
>
> Thinking about it, I like your idea better (file.bytes()
> and file.text()).

This is better than making it a static/class method on file (which has
the problem that it might return something that's not a file at all --
file is a particular stream implementation, there may be others) but I
don't like the tight coupling it creates between a data type and an
I/O library. I still think that having global (i.e. built-in) factory
functions for creating various stream types makes the most sense.

--
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
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