A Brief Annotation
I've been quite busy working on both the next article in my packaging series and on the overall appearance of the blog (I wasn't able to keep that confined to the weekend, apparently).
So, today, just a quick note, on the occasion of the 4th anniversary of the creation of PEP 649 "Deferred Evaluation Of Annotations Using Descriptors".
Yes, that's a mouthful, but in short: starting in Python 3.14, if you use annotations, you'll be able to defer the evaluation of the annotation code. (The feature was supposed to be added for 3.13, but didn't make it in.) That means you don't have to rely on strings for forward references in your type annotations, but you can still make full use of annotations at runtime (you'll have a proper object for the annotation itself, rather than just a string). Thank you to core Python developer Mr. Larry Hastings for putting a tremendous amount of effort into refining this proposal.
Now, I don't personally use type annotations very much - I don't use a type checker at all; I only write annotations as a form of documentation. But as it happened, when I was new to the Python Discourse forum, I came across Mr. Hastings' post, puzzling over the best way to name what will soon become the __annotate__ attribute of annotated objects.
The name __annotate__ was my suggestion.
I was not credited in the PEP, and I was ignored when I tried to point this out. So it falls to me to draw attention to my contribution.
This is all very niche stuff, of course - but I'm happy to have been able to leave this mark on the Python language itself, as opposed to just making useful things with it.