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`Counter.__init__` can't be typed safely

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#1,846 8 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
python
Domain
devtools

Research direction

Start by reviewing the Counter overload example and the proposed typing.Error behavior in this issue. No repository files or tests are identified; completion would require an agreed type-system design and a documented way to represent or diagnose the unsafe overload.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

topic: other

Counter overloads are unsafe

from collections import Counter

# no type errors reported and nothing tricky going on
a = {"a": "hello"}
b = Counter(a)
c = b.get("a", 0)
print(c + 2)  # crash

and I think there isn't a way to express them safely in the current type system.
Iterable[_T] needs to be something like Iterable[_T] - Mapping[_T, ~int]

If type checkers want to address this now, it would probably have to be a special case.

Without having to worry about type intersections/differences/negations, maybe we could have a way to indicate:
"If this overload matches (after all previous overloads fail), a type error should be reported."

something like:

    @overload
    def __init__(self, mapping: Mapping[_T, Any], /) -> typing.Error: ...
Dominant language
Python
Stars
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Forks
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Avg merge
23h
Merged PRs (30d)
8

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  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

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