[Python-ideas] Structural type checking for PEP 484

[Sven R. Kunze]

On 10.09.2015 03:50, Brendan Barnwell wrote:
> On 2015-09-09 13:17, Guido van Rossum wrote:
>> Jukka wrote up a proposal for structural subtyping. It's pretty good.
>> Please discuss.
>>
>> https://github.com/ambv/typehinting/issues/11#issuecomment-138133867
>
>     I'm not totally hip to all the latest typing developments,

You bet what I am.

> but I'm not sure I fully understand the benefit of this protocol 
> concept.  At the beginning it says that classes have to be explicitly 
> marked to support these protocols.  But why is that? Doesn't the 
> existing __subclasshook__ already allow an ABC to use any criteria it 
> likes to determine if a given class is considered a subclass?  So 
> couldn't ABCs like the ones we already have inspect the type 
> annotations and decide a class "counts" as an iterable (or whatever) 
> if it defines the right methods with the right type hints?
>

The benefit from what I understand is actually really, really nice. It's 
basically adding the ability to shorten the following 'capability' check:

if hasattr(obj, 'important') and hasattr(obj, 'relevant') and 
hasattr(obj, 'necessary'):
     # do

to

if implements(obj, protocol):
     # do


As usual with type hints, functionality is not guaranteed. But it 
simplifies sanity checks OR decision making:


if implements(obj, protocol1):
     # do this
elif implements(obj, (protocol2, protocol3)):
     # do that


The ability to extract all protocols of a type would provide a more 
flexible way of decision making and processing such as:

if my_protocol in obj.__protocols__:
     # iterate over the protocols and do something


@Jukka
I haven't found the abilities described above. Would it make sense to 
add it (except it's already there)?


Best,
Sven