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Comment by noelwelsh | Hacker News Reader

No parametric polymorphism aka generic types?

There's little value for parametric polymorphism at this level as it requires parameters (not only type parameters, but also value parameters, as otherwise the type parameter are dangling).

It's better to think of these types as different. Maybe "primitive types" or "shapes".

It's in the context of a Python JIT, where we're looking for a different kind of type information

JIT internals are very much not my area so this might be an ignorant question but ... why doesn't the parametric issue come up in this context? The author starts with the example of a value which could be a List or a String, where the code calls for its `len`. But one could also need to reason about `x: list[list[str]] | list[str]` and where we'll do `y = len(x[0]) if len(x) > 0 else -1` which requires the system to be able to represent both the type of x and x[0] right?

You typically don't represent that information in the type of the object itself but rather as separate information for the type of the values (ie fields). So maybe it's "a list, and also the values are lists" or maybe it's "a list, and also the first value is a string, and the other values are integers"... and maybe it's "a list, and the values are strings, and also it has a field named 'foo' that's an integer for some reason".

You can still have the same information (depending on the actual system), just represented differently - parametric polymorphism is a bit too rigid here because not everything fits neatly into generic schemas.

And another bit of info: it's much harder to reliably track that, because as soon as the list (for example) escapes, its elements could have any type and it could be any size. PyPy has storage strategies and speculative typing (with guards and deoptimization) that help with this kind of thing.

Julia does this for parametric types, too.

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