On Tue, Jun 19, 2018 at 4:34 AM, Jim Lee <jle...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On 06/18/2018 11:18 AM, Chris Angelico wrote: >> >> What, fundamentally, is the difference between type hints and assertions, >> such that - in >> your view - one gets syntax and the other is just comments? > > Type hints are just that - hints. They have no syntactic meaning to the > parser, and do not affect the execution path in any way. Therefore, they are > effectively and actually comments. The way they have been implemented, > though, causes noise to be interspersed with live code and, as others have > said, are difficult to remove or ignore. >
I don't know what you mean by "syntactic meaning". Do you mean that they create no executable bytecode, that they have no run-time influence? Because that's not entirely true; they are stored, and can be viewed at run-time. In fact, in optimized mode, assertions produce no bytecode whatsoever; so by that definition, they are more comment-y than annotations are. Do you have some other definition? ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
