[Python-ideas] ABC: what about the method arguments ?

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Thu, 23 Sep 2010 16:37:21 +0200
Tarek Ziadé <ziade.tarek at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> The problem is that the implemented method could have a different list
> of arguments and will eventually fail.
> 
> Using inspect, we could check in __subclasshook__ that the arguments
> defined are the same than the ones defined in the abstractmethod.--
> the name and the ordering.

I don't think we should steer in the type checking direction.
After all, the Python philosophy of dynamicity (dynamism?) is
articulated around the idea that checking types "ahead of time" is
useless. IMO, ABCs should be used more as a convention for documenting
what capabilities a class claims to expose, than for type checking.

(also, you'll have a hard time checking methods with *args or **kwargs
parameters)

Regards

Antoine.