[Python-Dev] str object going in Py3K

Thu Feb 16 06:59:55 CET 2006

On Feb 15, 2006, at 9:51 AM, Barry Warsaw wrote:
> On Wed, 2006年02月15日 at 09:17 -0800, Guido van Rossum wrote:
>>> Regarding open vs. opentext, I'm still not sure. I don't want to
>> generalize from the openbytes precedent to openstr or openunicode
>> (especially since the former is wrong in 2.x and the latter is wrong
>> in 3.0). I'm tempting to hold out for open() since it's most
>> compatible.
>> If we go with two functions, I'd much rather hang them off of the file
> type object then add two new builtins. I really do think file.bytes()
> and file.text() (a.k.a. open.bytes() and open.text()) is better than
> opentext() or openbytes().

I agree, or, MAL's idea of bytes.open() and unicode.open() is also 
good. My fondest dream is that we do NOT have an 'open' builtin 
which has proven to be very error-prone when used in Windows by 
newbies (as evidenced by beginner errors as seen on c.l.py, the 
python-help lists, and other venues) -- defaulting 'open' to text is 
errorprone, defaulting it to binary doesn't seem the greatest idea 
either, principle "when in doubt, resist the temptation to guess" 
strongly suggests not having 'open' as a built-in at all. (And 
namemangling into openthis and openthat seems less Pythonic to me 
than exploiting namespaces by making structured names, either 
this.open and that.open or open.this and open.that). IOW, I entirely 
agree with Barry and Marc Andre.
Alex