What variable type is returned from Open()?

[dcwhatthe at gmail.com]

Yes,personal preference is definitely a factor and a bias, in these matters.

But aside from trying to make it easier for future A.I. to figure out what the heck we humans were doing, it also makes a difference in how the IDE interpets the code.

Maybe it isn't true for all IDE's or all languages. (I know SOMEONE will interject here, to argue for the sake of arguing). But when I worked with Groovy in Intellij about 5 years ago, there were times when the IDE was confused, during a debugging sessions. I don't remember the exact details, but that anomaly happened only with DEFed variables ; it didn't happen when the data type was specified.