On Aug 4, 2004, at 9:46 AM, Jim Fulton wrote:
Terry Reedy wrote:
...
Decorators will add complexity, regardless of syntax.
Especially in their current over-powered form. If decorators didn't have to take arguments, then you could use a syntax like:
def classmethod foo(cls, ...): ...
This does add complexity, but I think it enhances understandability.
I understand why some people want to be able to pass arguments to decorators, but frankly, I find many of the examples of doing so down right scary.
All of the important use cases I've found and seen for decorators have arguments. PyObjC and ctypes (possibly Jython, IronPython) will use them to specify the input and output argument types for a function (integers, pointers, etc.). PJE has cooked up some interesting stuff using decorators to do generic functions. I use these sorts of things far more often than classmethod and staticmethod (or the like). I can also imagine using them for something like decorating functions with four character suite and event codes for responding to AppleEvents in Mac apps. I wouldn't really care for decorators at all if I couldn't use them to these sorts of things. Your proposal would make decorators nearly as bad as the current pre-2.4 situation. This is REALLY ugly: foo = decorator(....) @foo def fun(....): ... -bob