Depending on the application, sometimes you want to have some socket operations going (such as loading a website) and have stdin being read. There are plenty of examples for this in python which usually boil down to making stdin behave like a socket and mixing it into the list of sockets select() cares about.
A while ago I asked an email list could I have pysnmp use a different socket map so I could add my own sockets in (UDP, TCP and a zmq to name a few) and the Ilya the author of pysnmp explained how pysnmp can use a foreign socket map.
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