iterating over lines in a file

[Tim Peters]

[Cliff Crawford, reacting to that the optional "size" argument to
 readlines() is treated as a hint, & that the implementation rounds
 it in platform-specific ways to a "natural" buffer size]

> Ugh, you're right (I checked fileobject.c to make sure).  That makes
> readlines() a lot less useful than I thought it was..:(

How so?  It *can't* take the size argument exactly as given, lest it return
a partial line at the end of the returned list more often than not.  Most
people would consider it "a lot less useful" then <wink>.