Thanks for bringing this up!

By the time PEP 604 goes live, the final aspect of PEP 563 will also go live: the behavior known as `from __future__ import annotations` will be the default.

This means that forward references are only needed rarely (and in some cases for backwards compatibility).

So I think it's fine if we don't allow ` int | 'str' `, requiring this to be written instead as ` 'int | str' `. We certainly can't allow ` 'int' | 'str' `.

Regarding `None | None`, I think that also shouldn't be allowed -- at least one of the arguments should be a type (or another union, or a generic alias like `list[int]`).

I think we will need to add these decisions explicitly to the PEP. Philippe or Maggie, can you propose a way to do this?

--Guido

On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 2:04 PM Richard Eames <github@naddiseo.ca> wrote:
Hi list! I was asked to bring this up here. When PEP604 was first introduced last year I noticed a few under-specified parts, namely how it interacts with ForwardRef and the edge case of `None | None`
eg:
>>> from typing import Union
>>> Union[int, 'str']
typing.Union[int, ForwardRef('str')]
>>>  int | 'str'
# should this raise an error, or return the same as above?
>>> Union[None, "ref1"]
typing.Optional[ForwardRef('ref1')]
>>> None | "ref1"
# should this construct (None first) be forbidden, or does str.__or__ or NoneType.__or__ need to be implemented?
>>> Union[None, None]
<class 'NoneType'>
>>> None | None
# should be forbidden? It seems very unlikely to come up in practise even if typing.Union supports it
>>> Union["ref1","ref2"]
typing.Union[ForwardRef('ref1'), ForwardRef('ref2')]
>>> "ref1" | "ref2"
# would this be str.__or__ returning types.Union?

In the discussion last year, it was suggested that there could be a `typing.Forward` that could be used instead of the bare string "ref" cases, or even requiring the union to be fully quoted eg `T = "Ref | OtherRef"`.
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--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)