This idea is being kicked around from forum to forum and nobody wants to have it. Here it's brought up from time to time and the response is usually "let a linter do it". In mypy (which is essentially a powerful linter) it was proposed ( https://github.com/python/mypy/issues/1888) and the response was essentially "better go to python-ideas or bugs.python.org". It's also been proposed as a PEP 484 feature: https://github.com/python/typing/issues/269#issuecomment-243765549 . I think one reason why such proposals are unwelcome to experienced users may be that when done right this is totally legitimate, and the requirement to use an @override decorator is just making code more verbose with very little benefit. (I could see a benefit -- if this is used consistently it could make spelunking a large codebase easier, because you would know which methods are overrides. Something like mypy could then enforce its use. But an IDE could also just highlight method overrides differently, maybe PyCharm or PyDev already do that?) -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido <http://python.org/%7Eguido>)