Sorry, I should have elaborated on my fence idea. I think we already have a suitable way to document parameters in a function’s docstring. (Something understood by Sphinx? I no longer recall.) My understanding is that Visual Studio no longer uses that info, but relies only on type annotations when prompting for completions.
Maybe I misunderstood what I read. I would like it if someone could explain precisely what’s changed w.r.t. VS. Given the source, it’s likely to be a very popular IDE, so if the VS authors have adopted one way of gathering parameter type information and now ignore the former scheme, users of that older scheme are stuck in two ways as I see it:
- The authors need to potentially document their parameter details twice.
- Despite perhaps not being interested in type annotations, they are more-or-less forced into it if their code base is to play nice with VS.
Happy to find out I’m way off-base. Even if I am, I worry that popular tools effectively make type annotations non-optional.