[Python-3000] Function annotations considered obfuscatory (Re: Conventions for annotation consumers) (original) (raw)

Jim Jewett jimjjewett at gmail.com
Wed Aug 16 16:26:44 CEST 2006

On 8/16/06, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

On 8/15/06, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:

[9 lines for a two argument def]

> There's another thing that's bothering me about all this. > The main reason Guido rejected the originally suggested > syntax for function decorators was that it put too much > stuff into the function header and obscured the signature.

It's a worse-case scenario suggesting how one could solve a very hairy problem. I don't expect that something this extreme will be at all common (otherwise I'd be against it too).

Yes and no; I don't think it will be that uncommon to have multiple annotations, somewhat similar to "public static final int". Also note that needing to disambiguate the annotations will tend to increase their length.

I hope that needing more than one line per argument will be unusual, but needing more than one line for a definition may not be.

That is one reason I wonder whether all annotations/modifications have to actually be part of the prologue, or whether they could be applied to the Signature afterwards.

-jJ

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