[Python-Dev] decorator support (original) (raw)

Michael Chermside mcherm at mcherm.com
Wed Sep 8 18:49:42 CEST 2004

Raymond Hettinger writes:

In my experiments with decorators, it is common to wrap the original function with a new function.

After creating the new function, there are efforts to make it look like the old: [...] All is well and good except the argspec. Running help() on the new function gives: [...] So, it would be nice if there were some support for carrying forward the argspec to inform help(), calltips(), and inspect().

I created something to help address this... the "obvious" solution of a decorator used for making decorators. It's example #6 in: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/moinmoin/PythonDecoratorLibrary

Currently it doesn't handle argspec, but I propose adding argspec (it'll be slightly tricky, but shouldn't be impossible), then including it in a "decorators" package. Until we have a decorators package, I think it can live in the wiki and/or the cookbook.

If asked to do so, I'll see about updating this to fix the argspec. If not asked to, I'll probably leave it alone, because as-is it is simple enough to serve as a decent example as well as being useful but with argspec handling it would be complex enough to be useful but too complex to be a good example to learn from.

-- Michael Chermside

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