Re: [Pysdl-devel] Patch: Python file objects

[Mark B. <mb...@0x...>]

On Wed, 19 Apr 2000, Martijn Faassen wrote:
> I think we shouldn't overload the load function too much. Can't we
> instead have two functions, one to load from a file object, and another
> to load through a filename? Or perhaps just don't have the last one
> at at all; it's not hard to create a file object after all. Generally
> it's better to have multiple functions instead of one function which
> can receive an argument that can be fundamentally different types (such as
> strings or file-like objects).

The load function will remain the same, API wise.
For languages like C++, function overloading using different types is common
place. Though these are through seperate functions, in C++, the internal
representation to the user of PySDL isn't overly important.

> Loading from strings directly doesn't seem necessary to me either; you can
> easily use StringIO or cStringIO to wrap the string up as a file-like
> object after all?

I agree. Polluting the API isn't worth the hassle, and its use is fairly
limited.

> From what I understood from the example, it seems 'file like' objects
> are supported already, as I saw StringIO being used, right?

In my implementation, file objects are supported. This is a direct type check
in the module, so it doesn't support non-file objects with the same relative
API.
Eric Jacob's patch adds "file-like" object support, via inspecting the object
passed to the various load functions, and determining if they have
read/seek/etc methods; this is why StringIO works in his example.