[Python-ideas] TypeHinting: From variable name to type

[Thomas Güttler]

Imaging you are developing in the django context.

Everytime you use a variable named "request" or "response" your human brains
knows that this is a subclass of  django.http.HttpRequest and django.http.HttpResponse.

How to give the IDE this knowledge?

One solution is the do typehinting everywhere the veriable gets used.

But why does the human brain not need this?

Because it is intelligent?

I would not call this intelligence. There is a simple
dictionary in the brain of the developer, which maps:

variable-name --> Type

And this mapping dict exists once per library.

If you are developing in the requests http lib, then
there is a different mapping. Then "response" means
type requests.Response.


Now my idea: Per module and/or per file type hinting from variable name.

Maybe a magic docstring in the __init__.py file:

"""
variable-name-mapping:
  {
    request: django.http.HttpRequest,
  ...
}
"""

This makes the type mapping available for all files in this directory (or sub-directories).

What do you think?




Disclaimer: For reasons I don't want to explain in detail, I am not allowed to
do implement things like this. This is just an idea. I would feel proud and thankfull
if someone likes it that much, that he implements it.




-- 
Thomas Guettler http://www.thomas-guettler.de/
I am looking for feedback: https://github.com/guettli/programming-guidelines