Why no open(f, "w").write()?

[Peter Hansen]

François Pinard wrote:
> 
> [Gary Herron]
> 
> > Here's the quote from the Reference Manual: [...]
> 
> Yes, I'm well aware of this quote. :-)
> 
> > I think we can agree that it must be considered "bad programming practice"
> > to depend on features which the manual claims may not exist, past,
> > present, or future.
> 
> I heartedly agree that it is bad practice not keeping oneself between the
> tracks set by specifications.  Without really knowing, I imagine that the
> said quote might be a politeness from Guido towards other implementations,
> encouraging them, so they could claim being called Python nevertheless.
> I wonder if the quote has been there since the beginnings of Python. :-)

It's been there since at least February 1999, which unfortunately for
debunking or confirming this theory, does not predate JPython...

http://web.archive.org/web/19990203001201/http://www.python.org/doc/ref/objects.html

(Strange, no earlier versions of the docs were cached by the Wayback
Machine...)

-Peter