Positional arguments to TypedDict constructor

[JelleZijlstra]

The spec says "The constructor takes only keyword arguments, corresponding to the items of the TypedDict." This derives from wording in PEP 589 "It can be used as a callable object with keyword arguments corresponding to the TypedDict items. Non-keyword arguments are not allowed."

But at runtime, the TypedDict constructor also takes positional arguments. This works:

from typing import TypedDict
class TD1(TypedDict):
    a: int
class TD2(TD1):
    b: str

def f(x: TD2) -> TD1:
    return TD1(x)

Pyright allows this program; mypy does not and reports Expected keyword arguments, {...}, or dict(...) in TypedDict constructor.

The spec should say whether or not this should be allowed. (My opinion: it should be allowed, since it works at runtime and doesn't appear to break any type safety rule.)

At runtime, even more is allowed; the TypedDict constructor actually allows whatever dict() allows. So you could do TD1([("a", 1)]), or TD1(TD2, a=3). Pyright allows some but not all of that. I'm inclined to prohibit anything other than calls with keyword arguments and calls with a single positional argument of TypedDict type; anything else is rarely useful and prone to unsound behavior.