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

Skip Montanaro skip at pobox.com
Mon Apr 5 12:58:22 EDT 2004 

>> 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.

Guido> That's exactly Jim Hugunin's argument for this syntax.

Since both C# and Java differ significantly in their typing from Python I suspect what works well for those languages (they already have a lot of declarative "baggage" because of their compile-time type checks, so what's a few more declarations?) may not work as well for Python.

Second, Python has a strong tradition of borrowing what"works well" from other languages. I'm skeptical that C# has been around long enough to suggest that its syntax "works well". It's pretty clear that Microsoft is going to ram that down most programmers' throats, so the C# user base is no doubt going to be very large in a year or two. If what you're looking for is to provide a familiar syntactic base for C# refugees, then I suppose that's fine, but from the examples I've seen, C# decorations (annotations? attributes?) can be sprinkled quite liberally through the code (and serve as much to obscure as to highlight what's going on). A C# refugee might be disappointed to see that Python's decorators are limited to class, function and method declarations. With that in mind, it doesn't seem to me that partially mimicing C#'s decorator system is necessarily a good thing.

Skip

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