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[Python-ideas] Type Hinting Kick-off

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Thu Dec 25 20:42:34 CET 2014 
On Thu, Dec 25, 2014 at 6:43 AM, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info>
wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 24, 2014 at 08:16:52PM -0800, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> > On Wed, Dec 24, 2014 at 4:50 PM, Eugene Toder <eltoder at gmail.com> wrote:
> [...]
> > > Pragmatics:
> > >
> > > 3. The names Union and Intersection are standard terminology in type
> > > checking, but may not be familiar to many Python users. Names like
> > > AnyOf[] and AllOf[] can be more intuitive.
> >
> > I strongly disagree with this. Python's predecessor, ABC, used a number
> of
> > non-standard terms for common programming language concepts, for similar
> > reasons. But the net effect was just that it looked weird to anyone
> > familiar with other languages, and for the users who were a completely
> > blank slate, well, "HOW-TO" was just as much jargon that they had to
> learn
> > as "procedure". Also, the Python users who will most likely need to learn
> > about this stuff are most likely library developers.
>
> I presume that runtime name binding will be allowed, e.g.
>
> from typing import Union as AnyOf
>
> def spam(x: AnyOf[int, float])->str: ...
>
> but not encouraged. (It's not that hard to learn a few standard names
> like Union.) So the above would work at runtime, but at compile time, it
> will depend on the specific linter or type checker: it will be a
> "quality of implementation" issue, with simple tools possibly not
> being able to recognise AnyOf as being the same as Union.
>
> Is this what you have in mind?
>

I would not recommend that to anyone -- I find that use of "import ... as"
is often an anti-pattern or a code smell, and in this case it would seem
outright silly to fight the standard library's terminology (assuming
typing.py defines Union).

I don't know if mypy supports this (it's easy to try it for yourself
though) but I do know it follows simple global assignments, known as type
aliases, e.g. "foo = Iterator[int]".

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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