[Python-Dev] 2.4a2, and @decorators (original) (raw)
Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Tue Aug 3 05:51:38 CEST 2004
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Well, I'm not. It seems like a decision made in haste.
Hardly.
Maybe I'll get used to it in a few decades, but right now I feel very disappointed. We were so close to agreeing on something nice, and then for some reason it all went pear-shaped. :-(
Not really. The contenders were:
[decorators] after the arguments. I really hate this, for good reasons which I won't repeat here.
[decorators] in front of the 'def'. For a while I really loved this, but several killer arguments were made against it, most having to do with the ambiguity, which confuses beginners. (A couple of people in the audience of my EuroPython keynote stood up and argued this with passion.)
Any number of variations on [decorators] before 'def', adding arbitrary mark-up to make it unambiguous. Including the 'as' keyword (which it isn't, by the way). All of which strike me as totally arbitrary. The 'as' keyword has a history of uses for renaming (e.g. in SQL and Python's import) but decorators are everything but renaming.
@decorators in front of 'def'. This is borrowed from Java (just like [decorators] was borrowed from C#) so minimizes invention. It isn't ambiguous, and as long as we're going to use arbitrary syntax we might as well use something that's familiar to at least one huge group of potential Python users.
And yes, I'm not 100% comfortable with it either. But I know one thing: in this particular case, now is better than never. So I'm picking a solution everybody can hate equally.
(What's wrong with pear-shaped, anyway? It's one of my favorite shapes. :-)
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
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