[Python-Dev] method decorators (PEP 318) (original) (raw)

Phillip J. Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Fri Mar 26 14:05:04 EST 2004

At 10:47 AM 3/26/04 -0800, Guido van Rossum wrote:

> Tossing out another idea: > > foobar: > author = "Guido van Rossum" > deprecated = True > def foobar(self, arg): > pass > > The declaration block must be followed immediately by a class or def > statement. It looks elegant to me.

The current parser can't deal with "NAME ':'" as a syntax rule, because expressions also start with NAME. I also don't like that you have to repeat the function name. And this would hide the "important" decorators (e.g. classmethod) amongst a large collection of metadata (unless you want to combine this with the "def foo [classmethod] (cls, a, b, c):" syntax.

If it's only classmethod you're worried about obscuring, why not:

def foobar(class cls, otherarg, ...): # ...

And then move all other decorators into some kind of delimited block in the function body, just before the docstring.

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