return of Any being reported as possibly unbound (via VS Code's pylance)

[jecluis]

Hi all,

I've got this slightly annoying issue where a function returning Any keeps having its return marked as possibly unbound. I am importing Any from typing, but still no joy. mypy, for instance, does not report anything of the such; pylance does.

I've combed through the internet, and found nothing pertaining this, which means one of two things: either I'm doing something incredibly wrong here, or I've hit just the sweet spot for some corner case. I'm leaning towards the former, but would appreciate getting some confirmation.

Cheers

[erictraut]

I'll need to see your code or (preferably) a minimal code snippet that exhibits the problem you're seeing.

To my knowledge, mypy doesn't track bound vs unbound variables.

I'm not sure what you mean by "returning Any". Any is a type that is typically used in type annotations. It's not a value that you would ever "return". Are you saying that you are returning a value that has the type Any?

[jecluis]

Hi Eric.

I'm very sorry for not being clearer. I meant a return annotation for type Any. See below.

Does this make sense? Do you need anything else?

[erictraut]

Annotating a return type with Any quite common, so that in itself is not unusual. There must be something else about your configuration or code file that is resulting in this problem.

I suspect it's a problem in the way you are importing `Any. Perhaps you are conditionally importing that symbol? Something like this:

test: bool = False

if test:
    from typing import Any

def foo() -> Any:
    return 123

A few follow-up questions:

1. Where are you importing Any from?
2. Is the import statement at the top level of the module or within an if/else or try/except statement?
3. If you copy the foo function into its own ".py" file (and add an import statement), do you still see the problem?
4. Is the symbol Any used in any other manner within your source file? For example del Any?

[jecluis]

I suspect it's a problem in the way you are importing `Any. Perhaps you are conditionally importing that symbol? Something like this:

sigh

You are absolutely correct. The import is wrapped in a try/except block for reasons that escape me (guessing backwards compatibility); taking it out of the block makes it work.

Thank you, and very sorry for the noise.