[Python-ideas] Type Hinting Kick-off

[Guido van Rossum]

On Sun, Dec 21, 2014 at 3:47 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 22 December 2014 at 06:32, Andrew Svetlov <andrew.svetlov at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Sorry, I want to ask again.
>> The proposal is for static checks only?
>> My expectations for processing annotations in runtime as-is (just a
>> mark without any restrictions) will not changed?
>>
>
> Correct, there are no changes being proposed to the runtime semantics of
> annotations. The type hinting proposal describes a conventional use for
> them that will be of benefit to static type checking systems and integrated
> development environments, but it will be exactly that: a convention, not an
> enforced behaviour.
>

Well... The elephant in the room is that *eventually* other uses of
annotations *may* be frowned upon, or may need to be marked by some
decorator. But I promise that in Python 3.5 your code will not break -- it
just might not be very useful to run a static checker like mypy on it.
(IIRC mypy used to only typecheck code that imports the typing.py module,
but this seems to have changed.)

When we discussed this earlier this year, a few other uses of annotations
were brought up, and some have proposed that static type annotations would
need to be marked by a decorator. There is even a proposed syntax that
allows multiple annotations to coexist for the same argument (a dict with
fixed keys -- to me it looks pretty ugly though).

I would really like to wait and see how this plays out -- the proposal I'm
working on is careful not to have any effect at runtime (as long as the
typing.py module can be imported and as long as the annotation expressions
don't raise exceptions), and use of a static checker is entirely optional
and voluntary.

Perhaps the PEP should define some way to tell the type checker not to
follow certain imports? That would be useful in case you have a program
that tries to follow the annotation conventions for static checking but
imports some library that uses annotations for a different purpose. You can
probably do this already for mypy by writing a stub module.

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