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I agree with Raymond. For binary reads, I'll go farther and say that 
even a 10% slowdown in performance would be surprising if not 
unacceptable to some people. I know that as hard as it might be for 
everyone to believe, there are a lot of people who crank lots of non-
Unicode data with Python. In fact, Python 2.X is pretty good at it. 
It's fine that text mode now uses Unicode, but if I don't want that, I 
would certainly expect the binary file modes to run at virtually the 
same speed as Python 2 (e.g., okay, they work with bytes instead of 
strings, but is the bytes type really all that different from the old 
Python 2 str type?).