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Prevent an implementation for `int` class from operating on `bool` values

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Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
45/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
python
Domain
backend

Research direction

Start by reproducing the example with classes 0.4.0, then trace dispatch from the typeclass declaration and the render.instance(int) registration. Done means render(True) no longer uses the int implementation and instead raises NotImplementedError for the unspecified bool case.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Context. Consider the following piece of code.

from classes import typeclass

@typeclass
def render(data_value) -> str:
    """Pretty-print a value."""

@render.instance(int)
def _render_int(data_value: int) -> str:
    return f'🔢 {data_value}'

render(True) == '🔢 True'

(this should be runnable as-is on classes 0.4.0.)

I would have expected this code to fail with a NotImplementedError because the bool case wasn't specified; but instead, that case is handled by the int implementation because

In [3]: issubclass(bool, int)
Out[3]: True

Decision. In an int implementation, recognize if the provided value is actually a bool and refuse to process that value.

Consequences. I have been writing in Python for quite a few years now and I might even have encountered this relationship between int and bool types before, but that is not quite a type of thing that I keep in my short-term memory to be able to instantly recognize.

I believe this change can help avert bugs which might be hard to trace otherwise.

Dominant language
Python
Stars
730
Forks
30
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

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