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Types for "truthy" and "falsy" values

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#1,606 7 comments 4 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
30/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
python
Domain
tooling

Research direction

No implementation files or tests are named. Start by reviewing the truthy and falsy examples, then read the linked intersection-types proposals and the typing project's guidance; the work is complete only after the design and expected type-checking behavior are agreed and the relevant typing support is specified.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

topic: feature

I found this function in our codebase and I'm trying to type it:

def run_until_truthy(fn, num_tries=5):
    for _ in range(num_tries):
        if res := fn():
            return res

    Exception('Giving up.')

The function repeatedly calls a callable without arguments until it returns a "truthy" value. Then it returns that value. Easy enough:

def run_until_truthy[T](fn: Callable[[], T], num_tries: int = 5) -> T: ...

This is correct but too restrictive. Usages like this don't work:

def load_something() -> str | None:
    pass

# mypy: Incompatible types in assignment (expression has type "str | None", variable has type "str")
something: str = run_until_truthy(load_something)

I can hack it to make it work:

type Falsy = Literal[None, False, 0, "", b""] | tuple[()]

def run_until_truthy[T](fn: Callable[[], T | Falsy], num_tries: int = 5) -> T: ...

Does it make sense to add official Truthy and Falsy types to the standard library?

Maybe a Truthy type would also make sense. Truthy can't be defined as a type alias of existing types, but could probably also be useful sometimes, e.g. to type the following function:

def get_falsy_values[T](seq: list[T | Truthy]) -> list[T]:
    return [i for i in seq if not i]

From thinking about it for a few minutes, I think Falsy would be more often useful than Truthy, at least in combination with the current typing features.


If there's an intersection type constructor at some point, the above examples could be written like this instead, which might be easier to understand:

def run_until_truthy[T](fn: Callable[[], T], num_tries: int = 5) -> T & Truthy: ...
def get_falsy_values[T](seq: list[T]) -> list[T & Falsy]:

2024-11-25
Dominant language
Python
Stars
1.8k
Forks
302
Avg merge
23h
Merged PRs (30d)
8

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