[Python-3000] Draft pre-PEP: function annotations

[Collin Winter]

On 8/14/06, Paul Prescod <paul at prescod.net> wrote:
> There are three issues: first, we need to RESERVE the types for
> standardization by Guido and crew.

You're just pushing the decision off to someone else. Regardless of
who makes it, decisions involving the built-in types are going to make
some group unhappy. This list saw several discussions related to
standard interpretations for the built-in types back in May and June;
here's a selection for you to catch up on:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-3000/2006-May/002134.html
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-3000/2006-May/002216.html
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-3000/2006-June/002438.html

One particularly divisive issue is whether tuples should be treated as
fixed- or arbitrary-length containers. Concretely, does
"tuple(Number)" match only 1-tuples with a single Number element, or
does it match all tuples that have only Number elements?

Regardless of which you pick, somebody's going to be pissed.

> Second, we can decide to do the standardization at any point.

Um, "at any point"? You mean it's conceivable that this
standardisation could come *after* Python ships with function
annotations?

Collin Winter