Type hinting a collection of a specified type

As of May 2015, PEP 484 (Type Hints) has been formally accepted. The draft implementation is also available at github under ambv/typehinting.

In September 2015, Python 3.5 was released with support for Type Hints and includes a new typing module. This allows for the specification of types contained within collections. As of November 2015, JetBrains PyCharm 5.0 fully supports Python 3.5 to include Type Hints as illustrated below.

from typing import List

def do_something(l: List[str]):
    for s in l:
        s  # str

Original Answer

As of Aug 2014, I have confirmed that it is not possible to use Python 3 type annotations to specify types within collections (ex: a list of strings).

The use of formatted docstrings such as reStructuredText or Sphinx are viable alternatives and supported by various IDEs.

It also appears that Guido is mulling over the idea of extending type annotations in the spirit of mypy: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2014-August/028618.html

Since Python 3.5 has been officially out, there is the Type Hints supporting module - typing and the relevant List "type" for the generic containers.

In other words, now you could do:

from typing import List

def my_func(l: List[int]):
    pass

This is deprecated since Python 3.9, now you can directly use the built-in list instead of typing.List.

Type comments have been added since PEP 484

from . import Monitor
from typing import List, Set, Tuple, Dict


active_monitors = [] # type: List[Monitor]
# or
active_monitors: List[Monitor] = []

# bonus
active_monitors: Set[Monitor] = set()
monitor_pair: Tuple[Monitor, Monitor] = (Monitor(), Monitor())
monitor_dict: Dict[str, Monitor] = {'codename': Monitor()}

# nested
monitor_pair_list: List[Dict[str, Monitor]] = [{'codename': Monitor()}]

This is currently working for me on PyCharm with Python 3.6.4

With support from the BDFL, it's almost certain now that python (probably 3.5) will provide a standardized syntax for type hints via function annotations.

https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0484/

As referenced in the PEP, there is an experimental type-checker (kind of like pylint, but for types) called mypy that already uses this standard, and doesn't require any new syntax.

http://mypy-lang.org/