Note: this was originally posted on the Discourse forum (https://discuss.python.org/t/7721), but it was recommended that I post here instead. In PEP-589: “Inheritance”, it is stated:

Changing a field type of a parent TypedDict class in a subclass is not allowed.

However, this restriction seems perhaps too restrictive in the presence of typing.Literal and PEP-586. Consider a situation like the following, which might describe some polymorphic data returned from a web API: from typing import Literal, TypedDict # Assume these all have several other fields class BaseDatum(TypedDict): id: str datumType: str class Thing(BaseDatum): datumType: Literal["thing"] class Widget(BaseDatum): datumType: Literal["widget"] This seems like a reasonable thing that someone might want to do, especially in a context where you can’t use something like Marshmallow for runtime validation & deserialization (don’t want performance overhead, restricted from using 3rd-party dependencies, etc). However, in the above example, MyPy emits:

tmp1.py:10: error: Overwriting TypedDict field "datumType" while extending tmp1.py:13: error: Overwriting TypedDict field "datumType" while extending Found 2 errors in 1 file (checked 1 source file)

Typically, Literal["widget"] is considered a subclass of str, as in: from typing import Literal x: Literal["hello"] = "hello" y: str = x It appears that the MyPy devs faithfully honored the restriction on changing type that is stated in PEP-589, but I think in this specific case the restriction is excessive. Should there be a revision to the TypedDict specification to allow this particular case? For that matter, why shouldn’t TypedDict members be covariant in general? Or is there a good reason why the restriction is what it is?