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

[Guido van Rossum]

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/)