Data classes don't do runtime type checking, but they do provide dynamic type in...

Data classes don't do runtime type checking, but they do provide dynamic type info through dataclasses.fields(). This function returns a tuple of Field objects, and according to the documentation[1], Field includes the attribute "type":

  type: The type of the field.

In Python 3.10, this now returns a string. In my opinion that's a bug (perhaps in the docs).

I verified this using a short test program:

  import dataclasses
  
  @dataclasses.dataclass
  class Apa:
      bepa: int
  
  first_field = dataclasses.fields(Apa)[0]
  print(type(first_field.type))

Running with 3.9 and 3.10:

  $ python test.py  # Python 3.9
  <class 'type'>
  $ python3.10 test.py
  <class 'str'>

1: https://docs.python.org/3.10/library/dataclasses.html#datacl...