[Python-Dev] Is static typing still optional? (original) (raw)

Chris Barker chris.barker at noaa.gov
Mon Dec 18 12:54:29 EST 2017

Good Bad or Neutral, this discussion makes my point:

Using typing annotation as a necessary part of a standard library module is injecting typing into "ordinary" python in a new way.

It is no longer going to appear to be completely optional, and only of concern to those that choose to use it (and mypy or similar).

And I do think it is really bad UI to have something like:

@dataclass class C: a: Int = 1 b: float = 1.0

be the recommended (and shown in all the examples, and really be almost the only way) to define a dataclass, when the type will in fact be completely ignored by the implementation.

Newbies are going to be confused by this -- they really are.

Anyway, clearly I personally don't think this is a very good idea, but I see that annotations are a natural and easy way to express the fields without adding any new syntax.

But most importantly I don't think this should become standard without consideration of the impact and a deliberate decision to do so.

A note: I don't know who everyone is that was engaged in the gitHub discussion working out the details, but at least a few core folks are very engaged in the introduction of type hinting to Python in general -- so I think a certain perspective may have been over-represented.

Are there other options??

plain old:

@dataclass class C: a = 1 b = 1.0

would work, though then there would be no way to express fields without defaults:

@dataclass class C: a = 1 b = None

almost -- but they is there "no default" or is the default None

Would it be impossible to use the annotation syntax, but with the type optional:

@dataclass class C: a : = 1 # filed with default value b : # field with no default

This is not legal python now, but are there barriers other than not wanting to make yet more changes to it being legal (i.e. hard/impossible to unambiguously parse, etc.

Maybe this can all be addresses by more "Untyped" examples the docs.

-CHB

On Sun, Dec 17, 2017 at 8:54 AM, David Mertz <mertz at gnosis.cx> wrote:

On Sun, Dec 17, 2017 at 8:22 AM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

On Sun, Dec 17, 2017 at 2:11 AM, Julien Salort <listes at salort.eu> wrote:

Naive question from a lurker: does it mean that it works also if one annotates with something that is not a type, e.g. a comment,

@dataclass class C: a: "This represents the amplitude" = 0.0 b: "This is an offset" = 0.0 I would personally not use the notation for this, but it is legal code. However static type checkers like mypy won't be happy with this. Mypy definitely won't like that use of annotation, but documentation systems might. For example, in a hover tooltip in an IDE/editor, it's probably more helpful to see the descriptive message than "int" or "float" for the attribute. What about data that isn't built-in scalars? Does this look right to people (and will mypy be happy with it)? @dataclass class C: a:numpy.ndarray = numpy.random.random((3,3)) b:MyCustomClass = MyCustomClass("foo", 37.2, 1+2j) I don't think those look terrible, but I think this looks better: @dataclass class C: a:Infer = np.random.random((3,3)) b:Infer = MyCustomClass("foo", 37.2, 1+2j) Where the name 'Infer' (or some other spelling) was a name defined in the dataclasses module. In this case, I don't want to use typing.Any since I really do want "the type of thing the default value has." -- Keeping medicines from the bloodstreams of the sick; food from the bellies of the hungry; books from the hands of the uneducated; technology from the underdeveloped; and putting advocates of freedom in prisons. Intellectual property is to the 21st century what the slave trade was to the 16th.

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