Comment by eqvinox

14 hours ago

> it does not actually cover what rules you can check or infer from type hints

Indeed this is the cause of maybe 30% of the warnings I'm seeing… items being added to lists or dicts in some place (or something else making it infer a container type), and pyrefly then refusing other types getting added elsewhere. The most "egregious" one I saw was:

  def something(x: list[str]) -> str:
      foo = []
      for i in x:
          foo.append(i)
      return "".join(foo)

Where it complains:

  ERROR Argument `str` is not assignable to parameter `object` with type `LiteralString` in function `list.append` [bad-argument-type]
   --> test.py:4:20
  4 |         foo.append(i)

Edit: now that I have posted it, this might actually be a bug in the .join type annotation… or something

Edit: nah, it's the loop (and the LiteralString variant of .join is just the first overload listed in the type hints)… https://github.com/facebook/pyrefly/issues/1107 - this is kinda important, I don't think I can use it before this is improved :/

3 comments

eqvinox

notatallshaw 13 hours ago

I assume in your example if you update the foo declaration to the following it solves the complaint:

    foo: list[str] = []

If so this a type checking design choice:

  * What can I infer from an empty collection declaration?
  * What do I allow further down the code to update inferences further up the code?

I don't know Pyrefly's philosophy here, but I assume it's guided by opinionated coding guidelines inside Meta, not what is perhaps the easiest for users to understand.

eqvinox 13 hours ago
Yes, annotating the type explicitly fixes it; but tbh I'd consider that type annotation "unnecessary/distracting code litter".
As far as their philosophy goes, it's an open issue they're working on, so their philosophy seems to agree this particular pattern should work :)
- notatallshaw 12 hours ago
  
  I agree, but as a type checker it is a subjective choice, whether to be explicit and not make assumptions or whether to infer from certain certain patterns as probably correct and not be noisy to the user. Very glad to see they plan to fix this.