\lineii{DEL}{Delete}
\end{tableii}
-Note that many of these have little practical use in modern usage.
+Note that many of these have little practical significance in modern
+usage. The mnemonics derive from teleprinter conventions that predate
+digital computers.
The module supplies the following functions, patterned on those in the
standard C library:
The \module{Cookie} module defines classes for abstracting the concept of
-cookies, an HTTP state management mechanism. It supports both simplistic
+cookies, an HTTP state management mechanism. It supports both simple
string-only cookies, and provides an abstraction for having any serializable
data-type as cookie value.
(The format of \var{address} depends on the address family --- see
above.) \strong{Note:} This method has historically accepted a pair
of parameters for \constant{AF_INET} addresses instead of only a
-tuple. This was never intentional and will no longer be available in
-Python 1.7.
+tuple. This was never intentional and is no longer be available in
+Python 2.0.
\end{methoddesc}
\begin{methoddesc}[socket]{close}{}
(The format of \var{address} depends on the address family --- see
above.) \strong{Note:} This method has historically accepted a pair
of parameters for \constant{AF_INET} addresses instead of only a
-tuple. This was never intentional and will no longer be available in
-Python 1.7.
+tuple. This was never intentional and is no longer available in
+Python 2.0 and later.
\end{methoddesc}
\begin{methoddesc}[socket]{connect_ex}{address}
variable. This is useful, e.g., for asynchronous connects.
\strong{Note:} This method has historically accepted a pair of
parameters for \constant{AF_INET} addresses instead of only a tuple.
-This was never intentional and will no longer be available in Python
-1.7.
+This was never intentional and is no longer be available in Python
+2.0 and later.
\end{methoddesc}
\begin{methoddesc}[socket]{fileno}{}
\end{datadesc}
\begin{datadesc}{ST_SIZE}
-File size in bytes.
+Size in bytes of a plain file; amount of data waiting on some special
+files.
\end{datadesc}
\begin{datadesc}{ST_ATIME}
Time of last status change (see manual pages for details).
\end{datadesc}
+The interpretation of ``file size'' changes according to the file
+type. For plain files this is the size of the file in bytes. For
+FIFOs and sockets under most Unixes (including Linux in particular),
+the ``size'' is the number of bytes waiting to be read at the time of
+the stat(2)/fstat(2)/lstat(2) call; this can sometimes be useful,
+especially for polling one of these special files after a non-blocking
+open. The meaning of the size field for other character and block
+devices varies more, depending on the local implementation of the
+underlying system call.
+
Example:
\begin{verbatim}