[Python-Dev] file() or open()? (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Wed Jul 7 01:09:59 CEST 2004


I recently saw a checkin that changed a call to open() into a call to file(), suggesting that using file() is more "politically correct" than open().

I'm not sure I agree with this. While open() and file() are currently aliases for the same object, this may not always be the case (it certainly wasn't always the case :-). In the future, I could see open() become a factory function again that could return an instance of a different class depending on the mode argument, the default encoding for files, or who knows what; but file will always remain a class.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)



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