[Python-Dev] PEP 318: Can't we all just get along? (original) (raw)

Phillip J. Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Thu Aug 19 06:43:40 CEST 2004

At 09:01 PM 8/18/04 -0700, Guido van Rossum wrote:

Is anybody seriously trying to come up with a single alternative decorator proposal that most folks "out there" can support, to be presented to me (with implementation, please!) in time for 2.4b1?

I've been trying to drum up support here for option J4, a compromise between list-after-def and @decorators:

 def p_statement_expr(p)
    @staticmethod
    @grammarrule('statement : expression')
    @version("Added in 2.4")
    @returns(None)
as:
    """Docstring could be here, or in the decorator part above"""
    # body goes here

I think it combines the best of several proposals; @definitions are more visible than list-after-def, but are not part of the function body, and you get to see the signature first. It doesn't define a new keyword, "as" is an unambiguous pseudo-keyword here, because decorators start with "@".

The principal downside is the presence of indentation without either a : or enclosing brackets. The syntax I proposed was something like:

 funcdef: "def" NAME arglist [decorators] ":" suite
 decorators: INDENT ("@" decorator_spec NEWLINE)* [docstring NEWLINE]

DEDENT "as"

There's been no response that I've noticed, perhaps because by the time I proposed it people were already sick of looking at options A through J3. :) Or maybe it just sucks for some reason invisible to me.

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