On 4/10/06, Guido van Rossum <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > [Guido] > > > It should mean neither. As I tried to say, the *only* > > > semantics is that the value of the expression is > > > accessible through the __signature__ attribute of > > > the function. It is then up to the decorator to decide > > > what it means.
Rephrasing for verification: In and of itself, the type specifier does nothing. It does add a (virtual) annotation to the argument, so that anything which *does* act (such as a decorator) can be written in a more generic manner. > [Jim Jewett] > > So type annotation is only for use with decorators, > > not for general documentation or compiler speedups? > Those are two entirely different purposes. It's fine for > documentation, for use by IDEs, and for use by e.g. > pychecker. So (besides decorators), it is for (exactly) introspective uses? > However, using it for compiler speedups is unlikely > given the run-time semantics and Python's extremely > dynamic nature. There are several PEPs (and some PyPy progress) towards more stable namespaces. As PEP 266 points out, these namespaces typically never change, and it might be reasonable to make these changes more expensive if they sped up the common "from now on, it is read-only" case. I can easily imagine a slightly modified __import__ that sealed the module after creation. Even for a seal that *can* be broken, it might be reasonable to say "but if you do, these precompiled objects that relied on the seal will take the slow path until they're recompiled." -jJ _______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list Python-3000@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
