Emulating Pascal input

[Jeremy Yallop]

* Michael Williams
| Having read through the many threads on this topic on comp.lang.python I
| realise and understand that modern programs' input generally requires
| thought and customization from the program author. However, we strongly
| feel there should be an equivalent to Pascal's readln (which is
| basically C's scanf but without the formatting strings) for simple,
| generally numerical, whitespace-separated input. 

Would something like the following be of any use?  It returns a tuple
of values, read from a file, converted to int, float, or string as
appropriate.  I'm afraid I don't know any Pascal, so I'm not sure if 
the behaviour is exactly what you want.

  import sys

  def readln(fin=sys.stdin):
      if fin is sys.stdin:
          line = raw_input()
      else:
          line = fin.readline()
      rv = ()
      for item in line.split():
          try:
              rv += (int(item),)
          except ValueError:
              try:
                  rv += (float(item),)
              except ValueError:
                  rv += (item,)
      return rv

Jeremy.