cooler piping

[Donn Cave]

Quoth Csaba Henk <csaba at phony_for_avoiding_spam.org>:
...
| Only if documentation didn't suck... The Library Reference doesn't mention
| anything about the type of the cmd argument of the popen functions, and
| after I saw the function working with a cmd of type string, I automatically
| assumed that it can be nothing else but a string. (And I don't blame myself
| for this...) 

Well, you will see a lot of it in Python, functions whose arguments may
be of various types.  Not polymorphic, because we're not talking about
any semantic overlap between the types - this is more like overloading.

I personally feel that it's a sloppy practice that leads to confusion
and errors, but I've done it myself, so at least you and I can use this
example as a reminder of what not to do.

	Donn Cave, donn at drizzle.com