Overlapping type

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
python
Domain
devtools

Research direction

Start with the overlapping-type examples in the issue and review the recent discussion they reference. Define the intended semantics for an Overlapping type, including unions, literals, and non-overlapping types; done means the behavior and typing rules are agreed upon.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

topic: feature

This is an rough idea from the recent discussion of whether to use object/Any or _KT for arguments of certain methods like pop or __sub__. E.g.:

class MyPoppable[KT, VT]:
    def pop(self, x: X) -> VT: ...

What should X be? Using KT (or KT | None) finds type errors like the following:

poppable: MyPoppable[str]
poppable.pop(123)

But has a problem with overlapping types:

def foo(x: int | str):
    poppable.pop(x)

On the other hand, using object doesn't catch type errors like poppable.pop(123).

The solution would be able to specify that any partially overlapping type would be accepted:

class MyPoppable[KT, VT]:
    def pop(self, x: Overlapping[KT]) -> VT: ...

MyPoppable[str]().pop() would accept str, str | None, Literal["x"], str | int, etc., but not e.g. plain int.

Dominant language
Python
Stars
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Forks
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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