I wouldn&#x27;t even call it dumb, it&#x27;s just what happens when a big group of people are writing software together.  Somebody writes a function, other people see it and start using it in ways the original author didn&#x27;t intend.<p>One byte at a time could&#x27;ve been a quick hack that was &quot;good enough&quot; in the original author&#x27;s use case, because he wasn&#x27;t reading a lot of data or only calling it once or something.  Somebody else saw &quot;readline&quot; and decided it was exactly what he needed and decided to use it everywhere.