Improved typing

[mberk]

Work in progress

Suggest we take this opportunity to drop support for Python 3.8 which is end of life and does not support parameterizing generic classes (dict, tuple, etc)

[mzaja]

While I am not against dropping support for EOL 3.8, container type hints in 3.8 can be parametrised as long as they are imported from typing module:

from typing import List, Dict, Tuple, Set

What is not supported in 3.8 is parametrising the built-in classes (lowercase letters) since they do not support indexing:

list[int]  # Fails in 3.8 because class "list" does not support indexing
List[int]  # Works in 3.8

Admittedly, this would be a tad bit more work, but hardly insurmountable.

[mberk]

@mzaja - of course. Let me rephrase: I am not going to make these changes 3.8 compatible