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

Skip Montanaro skip at pobox.com
Fri Aug 6 04:57:47 CEST 2004 

Anthony> From being a -0 (when Guido first mentioned it) to a +0 (at the
Anthony> time of checkin) I'm now +1 on this form of decorator.

It's still not my first choice. As others have observed, most functions have no more than three parameters and it should be rare for a function to have more than two decorators, so in the common case the list-after-def works (decorators are prominent - on the def line), but don't obscure the beginning of the definition ("def", function name, parameter list).

Anthony> (It's different in that way to "print >>", which I still hate
Anthony> <wink>)

Odd, I've always liked it. I use it heavily for debugging. The ">>" is easy to grep for when I want to rip 'em out, and I can combine the convenience of the print statement with redirection to stderr.

Anthony> "The @ sign is used in Perl."
Anthony> And?

I think the point there is that Perl has this history of using prefix punctuation ($, @, %) to modify the meaning of the identifier that follows, and more generally using punctuation in all sorts of non-mnemonic ways. To a certain degree @-decorators have that same feel.

Skip

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list