Any vs. object

The type object is another type that can have an instance of arbitrarytype as a value. Unlike Any, object is an ordinary static type (itis similar to Object in Java), and only operations valid for _all_types are accepted for object values. These are all valid:

def f(o: object) -> None:
    if o:
        print(o)
    print(isinstance(o, int))
    o = 2
    o = 'foo'

These are, however, flagged as errors, since not all objects support theseoperations:

def f(o: object) -> None:
    o.foo()       # Error!
    o + 2         # Error!
    open(o)       # Error!
    n = 1  # type: int
    n = o         # Error!

You can use cast() (see chapter Casts and type assertions) or isinstance() togo from a general type such as object to a more specifictype (subtype) such as int. cast() is not needed withdynamically typed values (values with type Any).