[Python-Dev] PEP 318: Let's not give in to FUD (original) (raw)

Jeremy Hylton jeremy at alum.mit.edu
Thu Apr 1 23:28:50 EST 2004

On Thu, 2004-04-01 at 22:34, Greg Ewing wrote:

Another thought about:

[decorator] def foo(args): ... What are newcomers going to make of this? It looks like a thrown-away list followed by a def, and there's no clue that there's any connection between the two.

I think it's obvious that there's a connection between the two. A bare list by itself would be nonsense and the actual list would probably say something like [classmethod] which suggests it's saying something about a method.

And even if the newcomer suspects that there is some kind of connection, what are they going to look up in the manual?

Maybe they'll lookup functions in the reference manual? I assume they'd be just as puzzled by:

def f(x, y, *args, **kwargs):

Who came up with that bizarre syntax?

Jeremy

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