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Mon Nov 10 05:38:05 EST 2003 · https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-November/040143.html

Alex Martelli <aleaxit at yahoo.com> writes:

> From Barry's discussion of the problem of "magic strings" as arguments to 
> .encode / .decode , I was reminded of a blog entry,
>
> http://www.brunningonline.net/simon/blog/archives/000803.html
>
> which mentions another case of "magic strings" that might perhaps be
> (optionally but suggestedly) changed into more-readable attributes (in
> this case, clearly attributes of the 'file' type): mode arguments to 'file'
> calls.  Simon Brunning, the author of that blog entry, argues that
>
> myFile = file(filename, 'rb')
>
> (while of course we're going to keep accepting it forever) is not quite as 
> readable and maintainable as, e.g.:
>
> myFile = file(filename, file.READ + file.BINARY)
>
> Just curious -- what are everybody's feelings about that idea?  I'm
> about +0 on it, myself -- I doubt I'd remember to use it (too much C
> in my past...:-) but I see why others would prefer it.

I think I prefer Guido's idea that when a function argument is almost
always constant you should really have two functions and /F's (?)
idea that there should be a 'textfile' function:

    textfile(path[, mode='r'[, encoding='ascii']]) -> file object

or similar.

Cheers,
mwh

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[Python-Dev] other "magic strings" issues