[Python-Dev] Decorators: vertical bar syntax (original) (raw)

Tim Peters tim.peters at gmail.com
Sat Aug 7 20:25:09 CEST 2004

[Anthony Baxter]

Lest my previous post saying I could "live with" the pipe symbol be misinterpreted, I still prefer @ over |. My main reason for preferring the former is that it's far more obvious in a page of code (I tried both).

Hmm. Why would you want decorator annotations to be especially visible on a page of code? Indentation and blank lines still make class, method, and function boundaries clear, and that's the important "page level" structure. Decorators are details.

The pipe tends to blend in to a disturbing degree.

Indeed, for me that's a reason to prefer | over @. BTW, while the PEP wasn't clear on this point last I looked, I hope it allows for whitespace after the | (or @, or =, or whatever it is).

Making it a different colour in an editor also doesn't seem to help that much.

Even better .

I'm also concerned that we don't make a horrible precedent here - that a new language feature is changed solely because other tools that were playing outside the boundaries of the language will be impacted. This would be an utter pain in the arse going forward.

Well, this particular language feature has changed every week for most of a year. If we're at the point where a change actually helps someone, I'm not gonna hold that against it.

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