Why does [line in open("text.txt")] yield newlines?

Question

Looking at solutions to reading in a file in Python, every time the newline character should be stripped off:

In [5]: [line for line in open("text.txt", "r")]
Out[5]: ['line1\n', 'line2']

The intuitive behavior (judging by the popularity of some questions (1, 2) about this) would be to just yield the stripped lines.

What is the rationale behind this?

Answer 1

Well, this is a line. A line is defined by ending with the character \n. If a sequence of characters did not end with a \n (or EOF) how could we know it was a line?

"hello world"
"hello world\n"

The first is not a line, if we print it twice we might get

hello worldhello world

Wile the second version will give us

hello world
hello world

Answer 2

_{Migrating the asker's response/solution from the question to an answer:}

Granted: 'intuitive' is subjective. 'Consistent', however, is less so. Apparently the 'line' concept in "line1\nline2".splitlines() is a different one than the one handled by the iter(open("text.txt")):

>>> assert(open("text.txt").readlines() == \
... open("text.txt").read().splitlines())
AssertionError

Pretty sure people do get caught by this.

So I was mistaken: maybe my intuition is just in line with the splitlines interpretation: the split stuff should not include the separators. Maybe the answer to my question is not technical, but more like "since PEP-xyz was approved by different people than PEP-qrs". Maybe I should post it to some python language forum.