On Mon, Oct 11, 2021 at 3:22 PM Erik Demaine wrote:

On Mon, 11 Oct 2021, Guido van Rossum wrote:

No, I didn't write that, Lukasz did.

I always found the following more obvious:

...

def data_to_table(d: Iterable[Mapping[str, float]], *, sort: bool =

False, reversed: bool = False) -> Table:

...

...

-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido) *Pronouns: he/him **(why is my pronoun here?)* http://feministing.com/2015/02/03/how-using-they-as-a-singular-pronoun-can-c...

On 12 Oct 2021, at 00:09, Erik Demaine wrote:

Another possibility would be that functions can't be used as their types directly, but need a casting operator like so:

``` def add_converter(self, converter: typeof(data_to_table)) -> None: self.converter = converter ```

`type()` of any function is `types.FunctionType`. We also have `typing.Type[Class]` which fortunately since 3.9 we can spell simply as `type[Class]`, to annotate that we want the class itself, not an object of said class. I'm -1 to the idea of introducing a separate `typeof()`. The name is much too familiar to the first two to avoid confusion. Consider that a function is equivalent to an instance of a class with a `__call__()` method of the same signature: ``` def data_to_table(d: Iterable[Mapping[str, float]], *, sort: bool = False, reversed: bool = False) -> Table: ... ``` is equivalent to an object of type ``` class Converter: def __call__(self, d: Iterable[Mapping[str, float]], *, sort: bool = False, reversed: bool = False) -> Table: ... ``` In fact, Mypy already understands this equivalence: if you declare the `Converter` class I'm showing above as a Protocol, you can successfully pass `data_to_table` where a `Converter` instance is expected. Full example here: https://gist.github.com/ambv/b46d0547decf2cb0cfdf379bb5f07d50 https://gist.github.com/ambv/b46d0547decf2cb0cfdf379bb5f07d50 My proposal is to enable using a function directly in a type annotation as a shorthand for expressing such a Protocol. In other words to mean "any callable with an equivalent signature". So that this: ``` class Stream: def call_converter(self, converter: Converter) -> None: converter(self.dicts, sort=True, reversed=True) ``` would be equivalent to this: ``` class Stream: def call_converter(self, converter: data_to_table) -> None: converter(self.dicts, sort=True, reversed=True) ``` I agree that in principle there would be some additional purity in having to wrap the function annotation in some explicit type marker, like `callable[data_to_table]` (yes, that would be my suggestion instead of `typeof` since that would be specific to callables). However, in practice I think this is unnecessary boilerplate because there is no useful meaning to a `data_to_table` annotation different from `callable[data_to_table]`. So I'd skip the boilerplate. After all, the thread is about introducing a quality-of-life notation improvement. - Ł