[Python-Dev] Re: PEP 318: Decorators last before colon (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Wed Mar 31 10:42:32 EST 2004

> Taking the prefix position as given for the moment, why overload list > literal syntax versus something currently illegal and meaningless? > Such as > > # almost as easy, or

Yes. This looks better and will make it more clear that it's a special case. Otherwise the decorators will look too decoupled from the function.

Why does <...> look better than [...]? To me, <...> just reminds me of XML, which is totally the wrong association.

There are several parsing problems with <...>: the lexer doesn't see < and > as matched brackets, so you won't be able to break lines without using a backslash, and the closing > is ambiguous -- it might be a comparison operator.

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

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