Hi all - I'm cross-posting this to the IP list as the subject seems to be an open issue there too. I'm working on generics support for Python for .NET, and there a couple of thorny issues that could use some discussion regarding naming and resolution of generic types. In C# you can explicitly name a generic type, a la Dictionary<,>. That syntax won't work in Python, of course. Looking at IP, it seems to allow the apparent Python name to be the unmangled IL name so you can naturally use the name. The problem is that the mangled name is illegal as a python name, and the unmangled name isn't guaranteed to be unique - you can potentially have any number of generic types as well as a non-generic type with the same base name in the same namespace: namespace Spam { public class SpamCan {} public class SpamCan<T> {} public class SpamCan<T, V> {} ... } I imagine that maybe IP has enough information available at compile-time to do the right thing for some common usage (binding and instantiating the types), but the overloaded name can still be ambiguous. A real-life example of this is System.IComparable - in IP, it doesn't seem possible to get to the non-generic version of IComparable anymore (or at least it was not obvious to me how to do it):
import System System.IComparable <type 'IComparable`1'>
It seems like we need to figure out some acceptable way of spelling generic type names explicitly in Python (an equivalent to IComparable<> in C#) that works within the existing syntax. There don't appear to be a lot of great options :( It has to be a valid Python name to work in an import statement, so that rules out strange operator shenanigans akin to the [] hack used for generic type binding. One would be to mimic the existing IL mangling in some way, a la:
From System import IComparable # the non-generic type From System import IComparable_1 # the 1-param generic
# or from System import IComparable_T from System.Collections.Generic import Dictionary_TT These are all pretty gross, and still don't totally prevent hiding of legit non-generic classes with those names (though it makes it less likely that names will be hidden than the current approach). I suppose another approach would be to continue to have only one type end up with the simple name, but provide a way to disambiguate it after the fact:
import System System.IComparable <type 'IComparable`1'>
# abandon all hope, ye who enter here... NonGenericIComparable = System.IComparable<<0 OneParamGenericIComparable = System.IComparable<<1 TwoParamVersionIfThereWasOne = System.IComparable<<2
That feels to me like it violates Python Zen in several ways, though. Thoughts? -Brian