[Python-ideas] A way out of Meta-hell (was: A (meta)class algebra) (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Mon Feb 23 14:16:24 CET 2015

On 23 February 2015 at 01:15, Joao S. O. Bueno <jsbueno at python.org.br> wrote:

On 22 February 2015 at 11:54, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

Ah, thank you: this discussion kicked a new naming idea lose in my brain, so I just pushed an update to PEP 422 that renames the proposed initclass hook to be called autodecorate instead. "It's an implicitly invoked class decorator that gets inherited by subclasses" is really the best way to conceive of the proposed hook, so having "init" as part of the name not only made it hard to remember whether the hook was initclass or classinit, it also got people thinking along completely the wrong lines. By contrast, the "auto" in "autodecorate" only makes sense as a prefix, and the inclusion of the word "decorate" in the name means it should be far more effective at triggering the reader's "class decorator" mental model rather than their "class initialisation" one. Why not just "decorate" instead?

The first reason is because the immediate question that springs to mind for me with that name is "decorate what?". The "auto" prefix hints at the implicit nature of the decoration, as well as the fact the decoration is inherited.

The second is because the hook is only relevant to the new implicit decoration proposal, and not to decorators in general. Calling the hook by the more general name decorate suggests that it may also play a role in explicit decorator invocation, and that's not the case.

Regards, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan at gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia

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