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IDE / Research Environment Incompatibility - symbols()

In the research environment, symbols('SPY') returns a zipline EQUITY object.
In the IDE, however, symbols('SPY') returns a LIST containing the EQUITY object.

This caused an algo I developed in the RE to fail in the IDE. It's quite easy to work around the problem, but is likely to cause confusion in moving between the environments. At the very least, I would suggest that a list of incompatibilities with fixes should be made available to users.

2 responses

Hey Dave,
Scotty posted an explanation of this here. We are trying to figure out the best way to make this less confusing.

KR

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Functions that return different types depending on their arguments at runtime; another Python Pet Peeve. :)