DESIGN.md

Design Decisions

Using strings instead of tuples to specify shapes

• Pros:
  • more concise, fewer paranthesis makes it more human readable.
  • can use more expressive syntax, e.g. named variadic dims (WIP).
• Cons:
  • need string validation at runtime
  • more prone to errors.

Decorator instead of type hints

• Pros:
  • this library is for runtime checking, not static analysis
  • type hints would interfere with existing type hints and static analyzers
• Cons:
  • more verbose, adds visual noise
  • if you change argument order or refactor, you need to remember to make the same changes to the decorator, which is error prone.