But "required" is the default -- you have to specify total=False to make fields non-required.
Yeah, required is the default. But the convenience syntax that we're discussing here wouldn't work with that. Having to specify `total=False` and then `Required` for required fields is not intuitive. It would be a good addition and a workaround, but it doesn't fulfill the need here.
It's pretty ugly (though there's a precedent, NoReturn for functions that don't return). It's also long and difficult to type due to the camelcase.
I also think most proposals look ugly. However, I'm not sure if it makes sense to reject a feature just because perfect wording cannot be found? People who can't live with the name could create an alias anyway, like: O = NotRequired That's probably what I would do - not to avoid ugliness but simply to make the syntax less verbose. Sure, I could do the same with `R = Required` but it doesn't fix the problem of having to think about it "the other way around".
Let's just not put funny syntax before the colon.
Is it silly? If we consider typescript-like syntax again: interface Data { opt?: str opt: str? } The first one reads as "opt may be there?" while the second one reads as "type may be string?". Doing `NotRequired[str]` reads as "type may be string but doesn't have to be" or perhaps as "type is not required but may be string".