Rock Solid Python with Python Typing Transcripts
Chapter: Typing in Python
Lecture: Where Do Python Type Hints Come From?
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Let's go way, way back to 2015. Here you can see the PEP for Python type hints.
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Sometimes they're called Python type annotations, but you can see officially they were introduced as type hints, and that's PEP 484. This was
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originally submitted by Guido van Rossum, as well as a couple of other folks here, supported by Mark Shannon, and it was introduced in Python
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3.5. So that's when I was... that's how I'm... how come I'm talking
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about, you know, if you're using 3.5 or above, then these things apply to you. All right,
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really quickly, we just scroll down to the motivation. So this PEP is a little more comprehensive.
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And it aims to add standard syntax for typing annotations. Now using the alternate phrasing
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here, opening up Python to easier static analysis and refactoring. Interestingly, they already call
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out potential runtime type checking, we will talk about that later in the class. And some of the
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the time, possible code generation utilizing this type information. So this is the definitive
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source of where Python type hints come from and the motivation you can look through. It's quite a long PEP as you can see from the scroll bar there.