I've been reading the hailstorm of comments on PEP 318. Yipes... did I help start that off? Lots of good ideas (and some others too) have been raised. I thought I would just weigh in with what I have learned so far. (1) Starting with Pete Shiner's creative list and butressed by subsequent suggestions, I am more convinced than ever that function decorators are actually VERY USEFUL. I'm now strongly +1 on PEP 318 with SOME syntax. (2) I originally objected to "def foo (bar,baz) [qux, quux]:" on the grounds that it relied too heavily on punctuation and using a keyword ("def foo (bar,baz) as qux, quux") would be better. I think that most of my objections have been addressed: * I said "but what would newbies look up", but then Paul Moore pointed out "Who, as a new user, saw 'import something as another' and looked up 'as' rather than 'import'?". He's right. * I said "def marmalade(self) [classmethod]:" versus "def marmalade(self): [classmethod]" is confusing, but then I think that two objections still stand: * "def foo (bar,baz) [qux, quux]:" is certainly not "executable pseudocode". * This is yet another meaning for "[]" in Python, it is certainly not indexing, and it differs subtly from list literals an list comprehensions. I suppose this objection could be mitigated by declaring that any expression evaluating to an iterable could be used (and sane people would use a list literal). However, there are objections to all other syntaxes that have been proposed, and I'm beginning to think that "def foo (bar,baz) [qux, quux]:" may be the best of the bunch despite these shortcomings. -- Michael Chermside