Interpreting os.lstat()

["Martin v. Löwis"]

> But it obviously does a lot of other stuff, including formatting
> the results of the system call for display. 

It most decisively does *not* format the results of the system call
"for display". Instead, it converts the C data type holding the
stat result into a Python data type. That data type historically
was a tuple, but now is struct-like type with the same fields as
the C data type.

It's the same as saying "+ does not do addition. It does a lot
of other stuff, including the formatting of the result of the
operation for display".

> Since what it really
> at issue here is presentation of the results, I'd say that the
> stat system call and the stat program wrapping it are very
> different things.

This is probably a matter of opinion. I think it is important
to understand that Python does *not* do any significant code
to os.stat and os.lstat; entirely unlike libraries in other
languages that attempt to also change the programming API in
the process of wrapping the system API.

Regards,
Martin