Python is DOOMED! Again!

[Chris Angelico]

On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 7:10 PM, Mario Figueiredo <marfig at gmail.com> wrote:
> Possibly one common use case will be Unions. And that factory syntax is
> really awful and long when you look at a function definition with as
> little as 3 arguments. The one below has only 2 arguments.
>
> def handle_employees(emp: Union[Employee, Sequence[Employee]], raise:
> Union[float, Sequence[float]]) -> Union[Employee, Sequence[Employee],
> None]:

Hold on a moment, how often do you really do this kind of thing with
"might be one of them or a sequence"? Do you really have a function
that could take an Employee and a float, or a sequence of Employees
and a single float, or a single Employee and a sequence of floats, or
a sequence of both? Or do you, much more likely, actually have two
separate functions:

def handle_employee(emp: Employee, raise: float) -> Optional[Employee]:

def handle_employees(emp: Sequence[Employee], raise: Sequence[float])
-> List[Employee]:

The union in the return value seems particularly unlikely... and unhelpful.

ChrisA