Thank you, lukasz.  That's the answer I anticipated -- I can appreciate the backwards compatibility aspect very much.

Regarding the docs, the docs say:

"Attempt to read and parse a list of filenames, returning a list of filenames which were successfully parsed."  

I don't know if the convention in the docs is that list always means *list*, but it could be changed to be iterable since that is the implementation.  

That fileobjects are also iterables could be pointed out here, but I think anyone making this mistake isn't going to make the mistake from misreading the docs, it's from skipping the docs and assuming read() is consistent with write().