[Python-Dev] Re: Decorators: vertical bar syntax (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Mon Aug 9 22:17:46 CEST 2004

Guido van Rossum wrote: > Let's make one thing clear; while decorators may be useful for > some to experiment with attaching signatures to methods, > mainstream Python will eventually have optional static typing > built in, and it won't use

I am immensely happy to hear this. I have read your old essay on the topic, but the long silence on this issue had me wondering whether it had been completely abandoned. I can't currently contribute to it, so I don't complain. But this is great news. Would you care to venture even a rough guess for when this might happen (and no, I'm not a lawyer, so you don't need a disclaimer in front :)?

Probably not before Python 3000, which is awaiting my retirement (or at least a sabbatical year), unless the community revisits the issue and comes up with a solid design that I can agree with. My retirement or sabbatical is at least a few years off... :-(

From a scientific computing viewpoint, this is probably the single biggest stumbling point when using python today. We have scipy.weave, f2py and even manually written extension modules, which we all know how to use. But having optional static typing for the cases where python's dynamic nature is a cost with no benefit will be an incredible gain. Other methods always slow down the otherwise very fluid feel of using python, so having this as part of the language will be fantastic.

I'm afraid that if you want something now in order to interface to 3rd party tools, an interim solution using decorators may be your best bet for the next few years (assuming Python 2.4 has some form of decorators).

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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