I share Ralf’s general sentiment here; the abundance of overloads makes it in 
my opinion undesirable to move to inline annotations due the sheer amount of 
extra clutter.

This is in part due to dtype-typing support, which is currently difficult to 
express without overloads, though I do expect this to change at some point in 
future (hopefully…).
However, there are also other common patterns that I don’t think we can 
reasonably express without overloads (be it now or in the future),
namely parameters such as `out`, `dtype`, `axis` and `keepdims`, all of which 
have a profound effect on the output type.

Regards, Bas

From: Ralf Gommers <ralf.gomm...@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, 3 May 2022 20:45
To: Discussion of Numerical Python <numpy-discussion@python.org>
Subject: [Numpy-discussion] Re: Types in pure Python sources



On Sun, May 1, 2022 at 9:08 PM Sergei Lebedev 
<sergei.a.lebe...@gmail.com<mailto:sergei.a.lebe...@gmail.com>> wrote:
> I think that's on purpose, because the type annotations are quite complex.
> For reasons of correctness/completeleness, they use protocols, mixins, and
> overloads. Inside pure Python code, that would be harder to read and
> maintain.

I agree that NumPy type annotations are quite complex. However, having them 
alongside the implementation might actually make maintenance easier, because 
there will be no need to update type stubs separately from the implementation.

I think I disagree, but let's see what others think - in particular Bas as the 
lead maintainer for all things static typing related. I will note that Pandas 
is moving in the opposite direction, moving type annotations out of the code 
base completely.


> IDEs should be able to deal with stub files anyway for compiled code (i.e.,
> the majority of NumPy), so that shouldn't be a fundamental issue right?

You are right, IDEs have to support type stubs anyway, but unlike type checkers 
IDEs cannot always prefer type stubs to Python sources (if they are available), 
because some IDE features need metadata which is *not* available in type stubs 
(e.g. docstring and source location).

To make things a bit more specific, consider the following snippet

```
import numpy as np
np.array(<CURSOR>)
```

Here a user is in the middle of calling np.array and an IDE could render

* the signature(s) of np.array (available in type stubs)
* the docstring of np.array (available in Python sources)
* (maybe) the exact module where np.array is defined (available in both)

"Go to definition" on np.array should take the user to the implementation of 
np.array or to both the implementation and the type stub.

"Go to definition" clearly should go to the code in the .py source file. Which 
is also where the signature is. For rendering something like a tooltip you 
really do not want to see the complex type annotations that we have. Something 
like this will make zero sense to the average user in an IDE:

```
def average(
   a: _ArrayLikeFloat_co,
   axis: None = ...,
   weights: None | _ArrayLikeFloat_co= ...,
   returned: L[False] = ...,
) -> floating[Any]: ...
```
And that's even ignoring the mountain of overloads we have - showing those 
would be much worse. Instead, you want the unannotated signature in the .py 
file:

def average(a, axis=None, weights=None, returned=False):

Ralf


Hovering over np.array would also need the signature and the docstring, but you 
could also imagine it rendering e.g. a snippet of the implementation etc.

Sergei
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