[Python-Dev] Status of PEP 484 and the typing module (original) (raw)

Jim J. Jewett jimjjewett at gmail.com
Fri May 22 19:23:16 CEST 2015

At Thu May 21 22:27:50 CEST 2015, Guido wrote:

I want to encourage users to think about annotations as types, and for most users the distinction between type and class is too subtle,

So what is the distinction that you are trying to make?

That a type refers to a variable (name), and a class refers to a piece of data (object) that might be bound to that name?

Whatever the intended distinction is, please be explicit in the PEP, even if you decide to paper it over in normal code. For example, the above distinction would help to explain why the typing types can't be directly instantiated, since they aren't meant to refer to specific data. (They can still be used as superclasses because practicality beats purity, and using them as a marker base class is practical.)

-jJ

--

If there are still threading problems with my replies, please email me with details, so that I can try to resolve them. -jJ

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list