On 1/3/07, Collin Winter <collinw@gmail.com> wrote:
On 1/1/07, Brett Cannon <brett@python.org> wrote:
Until extensive usage happens with annotations we shouldn't try to shoehorn consumers of the annotations into a specific solution. As you said, something will probably organically grow and that can be supported in another PEP later on (probably with stdlib support).
I agree that a convention will develop organically, but I would add that the emergence of that convention will be governed by two things: who has the bigger market share, and who's first to market. When the first big project like Zope or Twisted announces that "we will do annotation interop like so...", everyone else will be pressured to line up behind them. Until that happens, smaller projects like mine will either a) not support annotation interop (because there's no good, obvious solution), or b) pick an interop scheme at random (again, because there's no good, obvious solution).
Actually, I think that's a pretty good way to arrive at a good solution. I don't this is something you can analyze on paper ahead of time; there aren't really any precedents I suspect (do you know of any other language that has semantics-free signature annotations?). You must've "built two and thrown one away" before you really know what the constraints are on the solution. I realize this is frustrating for you, but I really don't think it's appropriate to pre-empty this with a standardization attempt before-the-fact (remember ISO networking?). You could be first to market yourself -- after all you already have a type checking package! -- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)