the following code actually dumps the heap into the temp file... very
strange. Make sure the file doesn't exist before running the script.
Only the list of numbers should be written to the file, but alot of junk
is added.

x = str(range(10))
f = open('c:\\temp.txt', 'w+')
f.write(x)
for i in range(10):
    y = f.readline()
    print repr(y)

f.close()

This is a duplicate of issue1394612, which was closed as "invalid". See
the discussion there:

- "in standard C mixing reads with writes yields undefined behavior [...]
If you want defined behavior, then, for example, add
>>> f.seek(0)
between your write() and read() calls."""

BTW, python 3.0 has a new implementation of the I/O stack, which does
not use fopen, and does not have this problem.