[Python-Dev] Call for defense of @decorators (original) (raw)

Phillip J. Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Thu Aug 5 23:14:45 CEST 2004

At 05:01 PM 8/5/04 -0400, Chris King wrote:

I only bring this up because most (though I realize not all) use cases for decorators (at least in their current form) seem to involve some type of attribute or metadata.

They may seem to, but that's only because most decorator proponents mostly refrain from using their current decorators in examples, for the sake of brevity. Decorators in PEAK, for example, create specialized descriptors for managing things such as asynchronous tasks, lazy attribute initialization, wrapping methods in transactions, automatic type conversions on assignment to attributes, etc. They're useful enough to motivate usage even without a decorator syntax, but they have little to do with "metadata" in the usual sense, since they implement what is specified by the "metadata", rather than simply holding the metadata for some class or other object to read and interpret.

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