Traditionally, duck typing is used to inject types into a library that isn’t expecting extension at that particular point — eg, substituting a test class for a real class in a data object that normally wouldn’t be a protocol.
I’m not seeing how that PEP addresses that use case.
- - - -
Similarly, the heading on the dictionary says “for a fixed set of keys” — but what if I want a dynamic heterodox dict? Eg, unpacking JSON.
You just end up shoving “any” all over the place. At which point, are the types helping?
Though, protocols do help the dict case for typing:
dict : Hashable -> Any
https://peps.python.org/pep-0544/#:~:text=Structural%20subty....
> substituted-for class to be defined as a protocol.
... which is false
> Similarly, the heading on the dictionary says “for a fixed set of keys” — but what if I want a dynamic heterodox dict? Eg, unpacking JSON.
You can quite obviously decode to recursive types (e.g. using pydantic), not sure what the problem is.
This section seems to agree with me, where it explains why normal classes can’t be subclassed to protocols:
> Now, C is a subtype of Proto, and Proto is a subtype of Base. But C cannot be a subtype of Base (since the latter is not a protocol). This situation would be really weird. In addition, there is an ambiguity about whether attributes of Base should become protocol members of Proto.
https://peps.python.org/pep-0544/#protocols-subclassing-norm...
- - - -
I’m not sure why you think it’s “obvious” that you can use a third party library to solve the problem — or why that addresses my complaint that the built-in type system doesn’t work for that.
If anything, the existence of a third party library hints the standard library doesn’t cover the use case.
and heterogeneously typed ducts: https://peps.python.org/pep-0589/