Bio and Publications

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Revised Understanding --> Revised Data Structures --> Revised Type Hints

My literate programming tool, pyWeb, has moved to version 3.1 -- supporting modern Python.

Next up, version 3.2. This is a massive reworking of the data structures involved. The rework lets me use Jinja2 for templates. There's a lot of fiddliness to getting the end-of-line spacing right. Jinja has the following:

{% for construct in container -%}
{{construct}}
{%- endfor %} 

The easy-to-overlook hyphens suppress spacing, allowing the construct to be spread onto multiple lines without introducing extra newlines into the output. This makes it a little easier to debug the templates.

It now works. But. Until I get past strict type checks, there's no reason for calling it done.

Found 94 errors in 1 file (checked 3 source files)

The bulk of the remaining problems seem to be new methods where I forgot to include a type hint. The more pernicious problems are places where I have inconsistent hints and Liskov substitution problems. The worst a places where I had a last-minute change change and switched from str to int and did not actually follow-through and make required changes.

The biggest issue?

When building an AST, it's common to have a union of a wide variety of types. This union often has a discriminator value to separate NamedChunk from OutputChunk. This is "type narrowing" and there are a variety of approaches. I think my best choice is a TypeGuard declaration. This is new to me, so I've got to do some learning before I can properly define the required type guard function(s). (See https://mypy.readthedocs.io/en/stable/type_narrowing.html#user-defined-type-guards)

I'm looking forward (eagerly) to finishing the cleanup. 

The problem is that I'm -- also -- working on the updates to Functional Python Programming. The PyWeb project is a way to relax my brain from editing the book. 

Which means the pyWeb updates have to wait for Chapter 4 and 5 edits. (Sigh.)

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.