[Python-Dev] update_wrapper should preserve staticmethod behavior (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Wed Jun 11 23:39:21 CEST 2008

On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 12:22 PM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

Calvin Spealman <ironfroggy socialserve.com> writes:

staticmethod doesn't wrap anything, it just creates a descriptor on the class with a get that returns the original, untouched callable. Doesn't even care what the thing you use it on is (function, other callable, or something else entirely.) FWIW, I still disagree. Technically, it might not "wrap" anything (in the sense that it isn't defined as a function returning another function - which is a narrow definition of a wrapper by the way), but semantically it does. To the non-expert programmer, it is a decorator like any other one. The fact that it is implemented differently from other decorators is not an excuse for it to follow different rules... Unless, of course, there is a good semantic reason for staticmethod not to mirror the module attribute. (by the way, does the same apply to classmethod as well?)

Remember (a) these are implemented in C, and (b) they were created in Python 2.2, before we even had decorators (first introduced in 2.4). I'm fine with making them more transparent and conformant to emerging protocols, but they will always be a little different, due to being implemented as objects rather than functional wrappers. The latter approach can be used for decorator implementations to, it just is done rarely.

I see this as something that can be done post beta 1. It has to be done while carefully remaining backwards compatible though.

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

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