[Python-3000] Draft pre-PEP: function annotations (original) (raw)

Phillip J. Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Sun Aug 13 04:21:47 CEST 2006

At 05:05 PM 8/12/2006 -0700, Paul Prescod wrote:

It seems to me that there are two very reasonable positions being expressed. Is the following (non-normative) text a compromise?

"In order for processors of function annotations to work interoperably, they must use a common interpretation of objects used as annotations on a particular function. For example, one might interpret string annotations as docstrings. Another might interpet them as path segments for a web framework. For this reason, function annotation processors SHOULD avoid assigning processor-specific meanings to types defined outside of the processor's framework. For example, a Django processor could process annotations of a type defined in a Zope package, but Zope's creators should be considered the authorities on the type's meaning for the same reasons that they would be considered authorities on the semantics of classes or methods in their packages. This implies that the interpretation of built-in types would be controlled by Python's developers and documented in Python's documentation. This is just a best practice. Nothing in the language can or should enforce this practice and there may be a few domains where there is a strong argument for violating it ( e.g. an education environment where saving keystrokes may be more important than easing interopability)."

I mostly like this; the main issue I see is that as long as we're recommending best practices, we should recommend using tell-don't-ask (via duck typing protocols, adaptation, or overloaded functions) so that their libraries can be enhanced and extended by other developers.

"In Python 3000, semantics will be attached to the following types: basestring and its subtypes are to be used for documentation (though they are not necessarily the exclusive source of documentation about the type). List and its subtypes are to be used for attaching multiple independent annotations."

I'm not sure why we would use strings for documentation, but I'm not opposed since it eliminates the question of multiple interpretations for strings.

(does chaining make sense in this context?)

I don't know if I know what you mean by "chaining". Good use of tell-don't-ask means that any interpretation of annotations nested in other annotations would be defined by the enclosing annotation (or in an overload for it).

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