[Bioperl-l] Bio::Root::IO _readline/_pushback behavior

[Kai Blin]

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Hi folks,

as I mentioned on https://redmine.open-bio.org/issues/3264 there is
something odd going on with Bio::Root::IO's _readline/_pushback
functions. This seems to be intentional, at least there is a test case
asserting the behaviour I'm seeing. It his however very confusing to the
unexpecting programmer using the code.

One assumption I'd immediately make would be that if I have code that
does a $foo = $io->_readline; $io->_pushback($foo); $bar =
$io->_readline;, $foo will be the same string as $bar, regardless what
other pieces of the code did. Currently, this is not the case, because
the readbuffer that _pushback pushes back into has new strings appended
to the end but readline removes them from the front.

This easily violates the "principle of least surprise", so I think we
should change the readbuffer to a stack. As far as I can tell, changing
the _pushback function to "unshift" instead of "push" to the readbuffer
breaks only the Root/RootIO.t test designed to test the old behaviour. I
don't see any other tests failing on my system that don't fail without
this patch.

Any comments from the core devs?

Cheers,
Kai

- -- 
Dipl.-Inform. Kai Blin         kai.blin at biotech.uni-tuebingen.de
Institute for Microbiology and Infection Medicine
Division of Microbiology/Biotechnology
Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen
Auf der Morgenstelle 28                 Phone : ++49 7071 29-78841
D-72076 Tübingen                        Fax :   ++49 7071 29-5979
Germany
Homepage: http://www.mikrobio.uni-tuebingen.de/ag_wohlleben
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