[Irmen de Jong] > I've been wondering why there even is the choice between binary mode > and text mode. Why can't we just do away with the 'text mode' ? > What does it do, anyways? At least, if it does something, I'm sure > that it isn't something that can be done in Python itself if > really required to do so...
It's not Python's decision, it's the operating system's. Whether there's an actual difference between text mode and binary mode is up to the operating system, and, if there is an actual difference, every detail about what the difference(s) consists of is also up to the operating system. That differences may exist is reflected in the C standard, and the rules for text-mode files are more restrictive than most people would believe. On Unixish systems, there's no difference. On Windows boxes, there are conceptually small differences with huge consequences, and the distinction appears to be kept just for backward-compatibility reasons. On some other systems, text and binary files are entirely different kinds of beasts. If Python didn't offer text mode then it would be clumsy at best to use Python to write ordinary human-readable text files in the format that native software on Windows, and Mac Classic, and VAX (and ...) expects (and the native format for text mode differs across all of them). If Python didn't offer binary mode then it wouldn't be possible to use Python to process data in binary files on Windows and Mac Classic and VAX (and ...). If Python used its own platform-independent file format, then it would end up creating files that other programs wouldn't be able to deal with. Live with it <wink>. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
