Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> added the comment: Before we backport this to 3.7 and 3.6, let's iterate on the wording a bit. I don't think the distinction between annotations and type hints is that annotations are materialized at runtime while type hints aren't. I think syntactically they are the same, but annotations are a slightly more general concept because they may be used for other purposes than to indicate the type of a variable (or argument, attribute etc.). So IMO in def f(): x: int 'int' is both an annotation and a type hint, OTOH in x: 'spam eggs ham' we have an annotation that is not a type hint. ---------- _______________________________________ Python tracker <report@bugs.python.org> <https://bugs.python.org/issue32769> _______________________________________