On 2021-11-12 at 14:43:07 +1100, Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
On Thu, Nov 11, 2021 at 10:06:45PM -0500, Ricky Teachey wrote:
Is there a standard idiom-- perhaps using a type-hint-- to signal to the IDE/linter that my user-defined class is intended to be used as a function/factory, and not as a type (even though it is in fact a type)?
Not really. I don't think there is even a standard idiom for the human reader to decide whether something is used as a "function" or a "class". It is subjective, based on usage and convention. As others have pointed out, many functions in Python can be considered as class constructor:
Isn't that why we like duck typing? I don't care what something is, I just care what it does. So when I call zip(x, y) and get an iterable, what's the difference (to me, as the user) whether zip is a class or a function or some arbitraru callable, let alone what the implementation of the resulting iterable is? If I want Java, I know where to find it.