"<a href=""https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KN2TTiGpDvM&amp;t=2m22s"">2:22</a> I can’t think of any situation where I would use “with open(...)”. In CPython", the file object will be closed anyway once the last reference to it disappears. For read-only files, this behaviour is fine. For files I am writing to, I want to do an explicit flush or close at the end, for obvious reasons. Either way, a with-construct seems unnecessary or even gets in the way.