syntax difference

[Chris Angelico]

On Tue, Jun 19, 2018 at 4:34 AM, Jim Lee <jlee54 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 06/18/2018 11:18 AM, Chris Angelico wrote:
>>
>> What, fundamentally, is the difference between type hints and assertions,
>> such that - in
>> your view - one gets syntax and the other is just comments?
>
> Type hints are just that - hints.  They have no syntactic meaning to the
> parser, and do not affect the execution path in any way. Therefore, they are
> effectively and actually comments.  The way they have been implemented,
> though, causes noise to be interspersed with live code and, as others have
> said, are difficult to remove or ignore.
>

I don't know what you mean by "syntactic meaning". Do you mean that
they create no executable bytecode, that they have no run-time
influence? Because that's not entirely true; they are stored, and can
be viewed at run-time. In fact, in optimized mode, assertions produce
no bytecode whatsoever; so by that definition, they are more comment-y
than annotations are. Do you have some other definition?

ChrisA