Tony Lownds wrote: > > It's possible packages like pylint will learn to interpret function > annotations to provide > better static analysis. Right?
It's true that for the area to be explored, which I know you've been doing, one first has to introduce an annotation scheme that can then be used by things like pylint. I'd like to see assertions about the usefulness of such annotations verified by modified versions of tools like pylint before changes to the language are made, mostly because such assertions seem to be more conjecture than prediction. In other words, the changes should be advocated, implemented and tested in a closed system before being introduced as wider language changes, especially given that Python has already seen a number of speculative changes which were made in anticipation of certain needs that subsequently appeared to be less significant than first thought. Another thing I find worrying about function annotations is the ambivalence around their purpose: the feature is supposedly great for static typing, but when confronted over the consequences of having developers spray type declarations everywhere, we're told that they aren't really meant for such things and that type declarations are only an example of what annotations could do. Here, the sales department and the engineering department really have to get together and get their story straight. Paul -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list