That's a great test, thanks.

If we were designing this from scratch, I agree that raising an exception is the right thing to do. But the questions is: can we change the behavior now?

I think it's unlikely that anyone is relying on these functions returning [W]EOF, and that raising an exception is unlikely to cause problems.

I'm curious: did you [Alexander] have some code where you're actually expecting an exception, or did you just stumble across this case?