(All tags.)
Sometimes code uses boolean checks on variables that can only be true. This is normally a sign of a mistake, either in the type hints or the implementation. Mypy has an optional check that can find such problematic boolean usage with its truthy-bool error code.
The original type hint proposal, PEP 484, initially allowed implicit optional types in function signatures. That is, a parameter with a default value of None would have its type automatically interpreted as optional. For example, this signature:
As type hints have evolved, Python has added simpler, more succinct syntaxes. But you still need to know the older forms, since Mypy uses them when reporting types.
Exhaustiveness checking is a very handy type checker feature. It ensures that all possible types of a variable are handled. If your code changes to add another possible type, you can guarantee that exhaustiveness-checked code paths handle the new case.
Python has no syntax to add type hints to lambdas, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use them in type-checked code. In this post we’ll look at how Mypy can infer the types for lambdas, based on where they’re used.
Hynek Schlawack recently described graduality as Python’s super power: the ability to prototype in the REPL, and gradually add linting, type checking, and other practices to refine your code into maintainable, production-ready software. You can also apply graduality within tools, activating checks one at a time and fixing the resulting errors as you go.
The typing module continues to evolve, with new features in every Python version. This can make it tricky if you’re trying to type code that supports multiple Python versions. To help write such code, Mypy identifies version checks using sys.version_info and reads the appropriate branch.
This post is not about importing typing.Optional, but instead imports that are themselves optional. Libraries often have optional dependencies, and the code should work whether or not the import is there. A common pattern to solve this to catch ImportError and replace the module with None:
The descriptor protocol allow us to completely customize attribute access. Python’s documentation describes the protocol with types involved described with words. Let’s look at how we can write those as type hints.
Earlier this week I shared my Python script template. Here’s an extended version with sub-command support, and an example script.