It would be terribly nice if the Popen class in the
subprocess module would allow a programmer to easily
say "send some data right now (if I have some to send)
and receive whatever information is available right
now".  Essentially the equivalent of
asyncore.loop(count=1), only that it returns the data
received, instead of placing it in a buffer.

Why would this functionality be useful?  Currently,
when using the subprocess module with pipes, the
interaction with a pipe is limited to "send data if
desired, close the subprocess' stdin, read all output
from the subprocess' stdout, ...". 

Certainly one can pull the pipes out of the Popen
instance, and perform the necessary functions on posix
systems (with select or poll), but the additional magic
on WIndows is a little less obvious (but still possible).

There is a post by Paul Du Bois with an example using
win32pipe.PeekNamedPipe:
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/msg/115e9332cc1ca09d?hl=en

And a message from Neil Hodgeson stating that
PeekNamedPipe works on anonymous pipes:
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2000-May/004200.html


With this modification, creating Expect-like modules
for any platform, as well as embedded shells inside any
GUI with a text input widget, becomes easy.  Heck, even
Idle could use it rather than a socket for its
interactive interpreter.