[Python-ideas] Suggestion for standardized annotations

[Cem Karan]

Oh, I didn't think it would get into the standard library in one shot, that's for sure!  I just wanted to gauge interest to see if I should continue working on it and promoting it.  I'll go ahead and do so, and put it up on pypi.

Thanks,
Cem Karan

On Mar 11, 2014, at 5:28 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:

> Cem Karan writes:
> 
>> Is there any further interest in standardized annotations, or
>> should the idea be abandoned?
> 
> Obviously there's interest; standards are a good thing when you're
> trying to share.  But not if they end up getting in the way of sharing
> because they're too limited or you end up with a bunch of standards
> such that no program can conform with all of them.
> 
> To avoid the latter, you need to provide an implementation and show
> that it's useful by waiting for it to be used.  You're not going to
> get a standard in to the stdlib at this point because there's not
> enough usage of *any* proposed annotation standard.
> 
> If you want to make progress on this, just do it, and worry about
> getting it in to the stdlib later.
> 
> To see what it takes to go directly into the stdlib, consider the PEP
> 461 debate.  There was no need to provide an implementation and wait
> for usage to follow *because %-formatting for binary was already in
> widespread practical use in Python 2*.  It was pretty clear that the
> default was going to be "just like Python 2", and that's how it ended
> up -- with the exception of "%r" because that would do the wrong thing
> in the intended use case (and "%a" does an equivalent right thing).