Comment by Pxtl

"you want to turn it into a file handle as soon as possible"

But no sooner.

For example, I've run into problems where I'm configuring program A server to talk to file location B... but I don't have access to file location B. But the client-side library for talking to the server tries to convert location B into a file handle and then freaks out because I can't access it. When I don't want to access it. I want that program to serve it.

If it was using simple "path" objects that didn't confirm that I have access to the path, everything would be hunky dory. But because it tried to convert it into a file handle unnecessarily, I get blocked.