On Tue, 31 Jan 2017 02:56 am, Grant Edwards wrote: > On 2017-01-30, Terry Reedy <tjre...@udel.edu> wrote: >> On 1/30/2017 8:58 AM, Peter Otten wrote: >>> Jussi Piitulainen wrote: >> >>>> It doesn't seem to be documented. >>> >>> For functions with a C equivalent a look into the man page is usually >>> helpful. >> >> Man pages do not exist on Windows. I suspect that there are more >> individual Python programs on Windows than *nix. I am more sure of this >> as applied to beginners, most of whom have no idea what a 'man' page is >> (sexist docs? ;-). > > IMO, beginners shouldn't be using the os module.
Do you mean beginners to Python or beginners to programming, or both? [...] > I always found the first sentence to be a bit funny: > > This module provides a portable way of using operating system > dependent functionality. > > I understand whay they're tying to say, but I always found it amusing > to say you're going to provide a portable way to do something > non-portable. Fortunately, as Python has matured as a language, it has moved away from that simplistic "dumb interface to OS specific functions". For example, os.urandom: - calls the getrandom() syscall if available; - fall back on /dev/urandom if not; - calls CryptGenRandom() on Windows; - and getentropy() on BSD. https://docs.python.org/3.6/library/os.html#os.urandom Similarly, quite a few os functions either come in a pair of flavours, one returning a string, the other returning bytes, or they take either a byte argument or a string argument. Some even accept pathlib path objects. Python is a high-level, platform-independent language, and the more platform-independent wrappers around platform-dependent functions, the better. -- Steve “Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure enough, things got worse. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
