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I’m curious what that would practically look like in Python.

I bet this would be a good use of vibe coding. Experiment with what-ifs. I can imagine being able to “show not tell” and reduce the signal-to-noise of comment opinions.

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Python makes it very easy to do these experiments without changing cpython itself. For example, a lot of the cases for the "not set" Sentinel can be handled by making it MyClass | None. Treat None as "not set". If you need a "no-op" then you can give MyClass a field or something which implies it does nothing. And then override the bool dunder method to make it return false if the no op field is set to true. If you really want, you can have a classmethod which returns a "no op" instance of MyClass so people can easily call your func with MyClass.no_operation() when you want no op, and null when its not actually set.

Sentinels just help you wrap that up nicely and for more general use cases, but theres value in stepping back and thinking about where the unset vs no op case matters.

It would look like a very different language that would be thoroughly incompatible with the existing ecosystem.

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