No. Ignoring that Python does not have anywhere near this level of optimisation, read() has side effects so optimising it away would be broken in the general ca

No. Ignoring that Python does not have anywhere near this level of optimisation, read() has side effects so optimising it away would be broken in the general case. It could be optimised away if all following uses would invalidate (seek, but only with SEEK_SET or SEEK_END) or ignore (pread/pwrite) the file offset, but that seems like an enormous amount of fussy work for what I would guess is little to no payback.