François Pinard wrote:
[Nick Coghlan]
George Sakkis wrote:
Still the word "open" sounds too general if the meaning is "open
a file-like object"; OTOH this could be a good thing if in some
future version "open('http://www.python.org')" was e.g. an alias to
urllib2.urlopen.
Exactly the reason the BDFL gave for preferring 'open' - it may be extended
to opening other types of objects than files.
So, when we *know* we are opening a file, `file' cannot be a bad choice! :-)
Moreover, practically, most of the times, we know we are opening a file.
`open' is opened (sic!) for some future magic. I prefer to protect my
programs against future magic, until this magic is precisely specified.
I agree. I don't want users to be able to specify URLs instead of
filenames unless I explicitly allow it.
To be honest I doubt open will be extended in this manner. I can see
the Pythoneers adding, say, a keyword argument to open to allow a URL
instead, but just changing the current behavior would be too risky. Plus,
what happens if I have a file named "http://www.python.org/";?
--
Michael Hoffman
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