[Python-Dev] PEP 563: Postponed Evaluation of Annotations

[Guido van Rossum]

To top off today's set of hopeful thread closures I want to put this one to
rest.

While I'm not ready to accept PEP 563 yet (I'm waiting for the first cut of
the implementation) I *am* hereby nixing the thunk idea.

When I said I was more worried about that than about the stringification
that wasn't about compatibility so much as about conceptual simplicity.
Right now the contents of __annotations__ can be one of two things: an
object created by evaluating an annotation, or a string literal. With
stringification these two possibilities remain the only two possibilities
(and they will still both occur in files that don't use the __future__
import). With thunks, there would be a third option, a 0-argument callable.

I've always disliked APIs (like Django templates, IIRC) that
"transparently" support callables by calling them and treat all other
values as-is. (What if I have a value that just *happens* to be callable?)
I don't want to add such an API.

I also don't like the idea that there's nothing you can do with a thunk
besides calling it -- you can't meaningfully introspect it (not without
building your own bytecode interpreter anyway).

Using an AST instead of a string is also undesirable -- the AST changes in
each release, and the usual strong compatibility guarantees don't apply
here. And how are you going to do anything with it? If you've got a string
and you want an AST node, it's one call away. But if you've got an AST node
and you want either a string *or* the object to which that string would
evaluate, you've got a lot of work to do. Plus the AST takes up a lot more
space than the string, and we don't have a way to put an AST in a bytecode
file. (And as Inada-san pointed out a thunk *also* takes up more space than
a string.)

Nick, please don't try to save the thunk proposal by carefully dissecting
every one of my objections. That will just prolong its demise.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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