[Python-ideas] Python docs page: In what ways is None special

[Jonathan Fine]

Hi Paul

Thank you for your comments. I think different people experience
things in different ways, based on who they are. What their
background, training, experience are. One person's precision is
another's pedantry.

An aside. Babbage and Tennyson: https://www.uh.edu/engines/epi879.htm

You wrote

> in a section called "The standard type hierarchy",
> this reads to me as referring to a type, informally
> named as "None".

When I read the same text, I don't see an informal name. I see a false
statement. By the way, here's why I see a false statement:

>>> type(int), type(dict), type(str)
(<class 'type'>, <class 'type'>, <class 'type'>)

>>> type(None), type(type(None))
(<class 'NoneType'>, <class 'type'>)

My (pure mathematics research) background leads me to dislike precise
statements that are not true. That's the way I am. Rhodri James
doesn't like sentences that begin with 'But'.

An aside. Reading further in
https://docs.python.org/3/reference/datamodel.html, I see three times
"This type has a single value." The informal names are None,
NotImplemented and Ellipsis. And there are only two Booleans.

I'd like to take this to bugs.python.org, if only to provide another
route to discovering this (very useful) conversation. Perhaps one day,
we'll have here harmony between informality and precision. Perhaps
every popular computer language has this as a goal.

-- 
with best regards

Jonathan