[Python-Dev] Adding functools.decorator (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Sun Apr 30 18:36:54 CEST 2006

On 4/30/06, Georg Brandl <g.brandl at gmx.net> wrote:

Nick Coghlan wrote: > Collin Winters has done the work necessary to rename PEP 309's functional > module to functools and posted the details to SF [1]. > > I'd like to take that patch, tweak it so the C module is built as functools > rather than functools, and then add a functools.py consisting of:

I'm all for it. (You could integrate the C version of "decorator" from my SF patch, but I think Python-only is enough).

Stronger -- this should not be implemented in C. There's no performance need, and the C code is much harder to understand, check, and modify.

I expect that at some point people will want to tweak what gets copied by _update_wrapper() -- e.g. some attributes may need to be deep-copied, or personalized, or skipped, etc. (Doesn't this already apply to decorator and decorates? I can't prove to myself that these get set to the right things when several decorators are stacked on top of each other.)

I'm curious if @decorator is the right name and the right API for this though? The name is overly wide (many things are decorators but should not be decorated with @decorator) and I wonder of a manual call to _update_wrapper() wouldn't be just as useful. (Perhaps with a simpler API -- I'm tempted to call YAGNI on the decorator and decorates attributes.)

I think there are too many design options here to check this in without more discussion.

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

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list