Vyper: Custom constants of lists

[nrryuya]

Version Information

• vyper Version: 0.1.0 beta 7

What's your issue about?

I'm not sure whether this is designed or a bug but Vyper doesn't support custom constants of lists.
It'd be better to support it if there is no concern?

# Invalid value for constant type, expected bytes[8] got bytes[8] instead
BYTE_LIST: constant(bytes[8]) = 'abcdefgh'

# 'ListType' object has no attribute 'is_literal'
BYTE32_LIST: constant(bytes32[2]) = [0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000,
                                    0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000]

# 'ListType' object has no attribute 'is_literal'
ZERO_LIST: constant(int128[8]) = [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]

# 'ListType' object has no attribute 'is_literal'
ZERO_LIST: constant(uint256[8]) = [convert(0, uint256), convert(0, uint256), convert(0, uint256), convert(0, uint256), convert(0, uint256), convert(0, uint256), convert(0, uint256), convert(0, uint256)]

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[jacqueswww]

Hmmm I don't think we ever considered lists to be constants, not that could not be - just that it never was considered.
So now it begs the question - should we or not ?

[fubuloubu]

Looks like the use case here is for an "empty list" or a list full of empty entries. @nrryuya are you looking for a way to assert that a list has not been set yet?

[jacqueswww]

Well it's not the only use case, I can easily imagine something like a making sure you have set of values like:

VALID_STATES:  constant(int128) = [1, 33, 44, 55 .. ]

Or another form of storing owners?

OWNERS: constant(address[3]) = [....]

Just thinking out loud - on what it could be used for.

[fubuloubu]

Case 1 would actually be better served by enums (which we don't have... yet). Basically something like:

enum(int128) State:
    A = 1
    B = 33
    C = 44
    D = 55

Case 2 is typically done dynamically through a constructor. Probably not the best idea to hardcode a collection of addresses, since they might change on every deployment and you would have to update the code, but I can see a _limited_ rationale of how that could be useful for something like templated programs (but basically, just use constructor args)

[nrryuya]

Looks like the use case here is for an "empty list" or a list full of empty entries. @nrryuya are you looking for a way to assert that a list has not been set yet?

Yep. I found this issue when I wanted to return a list full of 0 in my BigInt.vy which represents a zero in a big number.

I'm also not confident about the use case of this feature...
As an example, we can use constants of a list of primes in programs like RSA Accumulator.

PRIMES: constant(int128[100]) = [2, 3, 5, ...]

[fubuloubu]

List of primes might be a good one!