On Jan 2, 2008 8:56 AM, Fredrik Lundh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Steven D'Aprano wrote: > > > Fredrik, if you're reading this, I'm curious what your reason is. I don't > > have an opinion on whether you should or shouldn't treat files and > > strings the same way. Over to you... > > as Diez shows, it's all about use cases. > > and as anyone who's used my libraries or read my code knows, I'm a big > fan of minimalistic but highly composable object API:s and liberal use > of short helper functions to wire them up to fit the task at hand. > > kitchen sink API design is a really bad idea, for more reasons than I > can fit in this small editor window. >
On that note, I really don't like APIs that take either a file name or a file object - I can open my own files, thanks. File objects are fantastic abstractions and open(fname) is even shorter than StringIO(somedata). My take on the API decision in question was always that a file is inherently an XML *document*, while a string is inherently an XML *fragment*. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
