Python Sanity Proposal: Type Hinting Solution

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, Jan 25, 2015 at 4:37 AM, Paul Rubin <no.email at nospam.invalid> wrote:
> Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> writes:
>> versus any other decorator, but the STRING:
>> "@typehint(...)"
>> being used where a decorator would normally be expected.
>
> I didn't catch that either.  I think if hints are to go in decorators,
> then it's best to extend the decorator mechanism to allow arbitrary
> syntax, e.g.
>
> @-typehint (str, int) -> bool
>
> The @- would signify that the typehint function is to receive an AST as
> its argument, rather than its callable.  The AST would be the parse tree
> for the rest of the line.  Alternatively, it could get the line as a
> string and parse it with appropriate functions from the ast module.

That seems extremely messy. Why not use what can already be done?
Since you talk about getting the line as a string...

@typehint("(str, int) -> bool")

ChrisA