> There may be a (deliberate? :-) misunderstanding. When I wrote about
> "you" inspecting code by a "3rd party" I meant that as a symmetric
> relationship -- the "you" could be a library and from the library's
> POV the "3rd party" could be you (or me).

I wasn't deliberately misunderstanding you.  And I understand what you're saying.  But the relationship isn't perfectly symmetric from a pragmatic perspective.

Let's say I write some code, and I also call into a third-party library.  I've annotated one of my objects, and the third-party library calls inspect.signature() on my object.  If my annotations are strings, and they aren't eval()uatable, then boom! it raises an exception, showing me a bug in my code, and I can fix it straight away.

On the other hand: let's say I write some code, and I call into a third-party library.  If the third-party library has an annotated object, and I call inspect.signature() on that object, and the annotations happen to be strings that aren't evaluatable, boom! it's showing me a bug in the third-party library.  Now I have a much larger headache: I have to notify this third-party vendor, convince them to fix the bug, wait for a new release, etc etc etc.  (And in the meantime maybe I add eval_str=False to my inspect.signature() call.)

It's my assumption that the former scenario is far more likely than the latter, which is good news because it's way easier to deal with.  The latter scenario is plausible, and much more inconvenient, but I think it's far less likely.  If I'm wrong, and there are lots of third-party libraries with stringized annotations that could have errors lurking in them, I'd very much like to know that.