[Python-Dev] decorator module in stdlib? (original) (raw)

P.J. Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Wed Apr 8 20:41:13 CEST 2009

At 10:51 AM 4/8/2009 -0700, Guido van Rossum wrote:

I would like it even less if an API cared about the actual signature of a function I pass into it.

One notable use of callable argument inspection is Bobo, the 12-years-ago predecessor to Zope, which used argument information to determine form or query string parameter names. (Were Bobo being written for the first time today for Python 3, I imagine it would use argument annotations to specify types, instead of requiring them to be in the client-side field names.)

Bobo, of course, is just a single case of the general pattern of tools that expose a callable to some other (possibly explicitly-typed) system. E.g., wrapping Python functions for exposure to C, Java, .NET, CORBA, SOAP, etc.

Anyway, it's nice for decorators to be transparent to inspection when the decorator doesn't actually modify the calling signature, so that you can then use your decorated functions with tools like the above.

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