If I can make a wild suggestion: why not create a little language for type specifications?

If you look at other programming languages you’ll see that the “type definition sub-language” is often completely different from the “execution sub-language”, with only some symbols in common and used in vaguely related ways. `bool (*myfuncptr)(int, float*)` uses a completely different set of syntactic rules than `rv = (*myfunptr)(*myintptr, &myfloat)`. So with some grains of salt you could say that C is comprised of a declarative typing sublanguage and an imperative execution sublanguage.

And an even better example is Pascal, which uses a set of syntactic constructs for typing that are completely different from the execution statement syntax: `var a : array[1..10] of real` looks very different from `a[1]`, where C `float a[10]` looks pretty similar to `a[10]`.

The next bit of my original email is another wild idea, the previous bit doesn’t depend on it really. I can imagine completely different ways of doing a typing sublanguage:

Python typing uses basically a subset of the execution expression syntax as its declarative typing language.

What if we created a little language that is clearly flagged, for example as t”….” or t’….’? Then we could simply define the typestring language to be readable, so you could indeed say t”(int, str) -> bool”. And we could even allow escapes (similar to f-strings) so that the previous expression could also be specified, if you really wanted to, as t”{typing.Callable[[int, str], bool}”.

Jack Jansen, <Jack.Jansen@cwi.nl>, http://www.cwi.nl/~jack

If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution -- Emma Goldman