[Python-Dev] IO module precisions and exception hierarchy

[Antoine Pitrou]

MRAB <python <at> mrabarnett.plus.com> writes:
> 
> If the characters are always the same number of bytes) then overwriting
> could be possible; that would, however, make the behaviour more
> complicated (sometimes you can, sometimes you can't), so it's probably
> just simpler to forbid read+write text streams.

Forbidding them would be gratuitous. There are perfectly safe uses, for example
if all writes are appends, or if you use a fixed-size encoding.
(and besides, it would break backwards compatibility)

Regards

Antoine.