ruby / rbs

Type Signature for Ruby
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Method overload narrowing #1875

Open ParadoxV5 opened 3 months ago

ParadoxV5 commented 3 months ago

I request a notation for method overload narrowing, such that subtype args narrow supertype args. The intent is so the return type of supertype overloads not longer need to explicitly include those of narrower overloads.

E.g., TrueClass#& example from prior brief discussion on Discord:

def &: (false? rhs) -> false
     | (untyped rhs) -> true

Contrast with our current compromise: https://github.com/ruby/rbs/blob/45b34bd9bf9a2b6872ae832f6a344b23dc75ec3d/core/true_class.rbs#L28-L29 This new solution enables us to type the result for truthy args without needing a “difference type” type truthy = top - false?. In fact, this is possibly the only practical use case for “difference types”.

I’ve considered moving this focus to Steep but decided that the entire RBS ecosystem could use this. For example, https://github.com/ruby/rbs/issues/1874#issuecomment-2155458884 finally encouraged me to formally file this issue.

Though it is backward-incompatible to change the semantics of | set by yore, we can instead introduce an new, alternative syntax, such as the tokens: