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I'd leave a docstring:
def foo(bor: Iterable[str]) -> None:
"""foos bars by doing x and y to each bar"""
Type hinting isn't intended to prevent all classes of errors, it's intended to provide documentation to the caller. Iterable[str] provides that documentation, and a docstring gives additional context if needed. If you want strict typing assurances, Python probably isn't the tool you're looking for.
This + an assert seems like the way to go. I think that str should never have fulfilled these contracts in the first place and should have a .chars property that returns a list of one-character-strings.
But this change would break existing code, so it is not going to happen.
IDK, I think strings being simple lists is less surprising than having a unique type. Most other languages model them that way, and it's nice to be able to use regular list actions to interact with them.
It's really not something I'm likely to run into in practice. The only practical way I see messing this up is with untrusted inputs, but I sanitize those anyway.
Yes, you're right. It also a lot of benefits.
Kids these days and their type hinting. Back in my day, all objects were ducks, and we liked it!
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I'm not sure why you wouldn't just use packing to pass in a list of some objects that you need iterate over? Isn't it normally bad form to pass lists as arguments? I feel like I've read this somewhere but can't cite it
Yes, that's a good alternative for Collection[str] but not so much for Iterable[str] as you lose the lazyness of Generators.
Look at the official docs. There is a table part way down stating which methods are available for each. I pick the one closest to how I use it. So if I'm not mutating I'll use Sequence over List to inform the caller I'm treating as immutable and to safe guard myself from mutating it in my implementation via static type analysis.
str matches most of these contracts, though, requiring additional checks if a str was passed or one of these collections containing strings.