[Python-Dev] Re: PEP 318: Decorators last before colon (original) (raw)

Paul Prescod paul at prescod.net
Mon Apr 5 04:17:17 EDT 2004

Greg Ewing wrote:

"Phillip J. Eby" <pje at telecommunity.com>:

There are different kinds of aesthetics. Guido's proposal has grown on me from a visual aesthetics point of view. After I worked with it a little bit, I realized it really is much prettier than decorators-before-colon. Your tastes must be different from mine, then, because it doesn't strike me as any prettier visually, either.

What people find readable depends mostly on what they are used to. The reason Python is "so readable" on first read is because it rips off so much syntax directly from C, the language that is the ancestor for all of the other languages people use today.

C doesn't have function decorators so people don't have expectations for them. But they will when they start coming over from C# and Java 1.5 in two or three years. One virtue of Guido's proposal is that it is basically what C# does. Java uses a pretty different syntax but it is also a prefix syntax. If Python uses a postfix syntax it will probably be alone in making that choice.

I'm not saying that Python has to do what the other languages do because they do it, but all else equal, being familiar is better than being idiosyncratic (i.e. different for no good reason). So I would rank "like C# and Java" higher than "fits my personal aesthetics in early 2004" because aesthetics are likely to drift towards C# and Java over time.

Paul Prescod

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