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potterru, I don't believe plexq was using _fileobject.read() -- 
he said he was using socket.recv(), and all the comments 
later were consistent with that.

The code you found does appear to *intend* max():  code 
following the snippet you quoted clearly expects that it may 
have read more than "left" bytes, and it would not be 
worrying about that had min() been intended.  I agree the 
code is pretty inscrutable regardless, but we'd have to ask 
Guido why he wrote it that way.

In any case, since this bug report is about socket.recv(), if 
you want to make a case that _fileobject.read() is buggy you 
should open a new report for that.