[Python-Dev] Re: [Python-checkins] python/nondist/peps pep-0318.txt, 1.25, 1.26 (original) (raw)

Brett C. bac at OCF.Berkeley.EDU
Tue Aug 24 21:57:03 CEST 2004

Neil Schemenauer wrote:

On Tue, Aug 24, 2004 at 11:56:13AM -0700, montanaro at users.sourceforge.net wrote:

Modified Files: pep-0318.txt Log Message: List some possible reasons why arriving at consensus about decorators has been so hard (or impossible) to acheive. There are certainly more. Perhaps you could add my reservation (objection is too strong a word). I think decorators are not powerful enough given their high syntactic profile. This could be rephrased as "if we are going the use the @ sign then it should be able to do really cool things". One idea is to have the compiler pass the AST for the function body to the decorator function. The decorator could create new nodes in the AST or modify existing ones. That would allow decorators to do things like adding a try/except without introducing another function call. The output of the decorator would be passed to the code generator.

That kind of stuff is my dream use of the AST; modifying it before final compilation to a .pyc file. Although that could also just be set up in a list that gets called on all compilations.

We could also just keep the AST around in the code object, although that would be space-consuming.

-Brett

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