With the patch attached to this issue, @singledispatch gains support for passing the type in @register via annotations.

This looks more natural and enables more thorough type checking without repeating yourself:


@singledispatch
def generic(arg): ...

@generic.register
def _(arg: str): ...

@generic.register
def _(arg: int): ...


The previous API is still available for backwards compatibility, as well as stacking, and use with classes (sic, I was surprised to learn it's used that way, too).

The patch should be uncontroversial, maybe except for the fact that it's importing the `typing` module if annotations are used. This is necessary because of forward references, usage of None as a type, and so on. More importantly, with PEP 563 it's mandatory.

Guido, I know that you have a lot on your plate right now. Adding you because of PEP 443 and PEP 484.

Idea looks interesting (like a basic runtime @overload). My expectation is that some changes are necessary in mypy for this to work properly.

Another (minor) problem is that this creates a circular dependency functools <-> typing.

Oops something wrong happened.

> this creates a circular dependency functools <-> typing

Well, it doesn't since I explicitly import typing inside singledispatch. By the time this import happens, functools is fully imported. This would only be a problem if functools itself tried to use singledispatch with annotations. Not impossible but super unlikely.

New changeset e56975351bc2c574c728f738e88effba7116279f by Łukasz Langa in branch 'master':
bpo-32227: functools.singledispatch supports registering via type annotations (#4733)
https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/e56975351bc2c574c728f738e88effba7116279f

Hello,

I believe this could be closed as resolved?  Do you think it should be added to the What's New? page for 3.7?

> Do you think it should be added to the What's New? page for 3.7?

I leave this up to Łukasz.