Some time ago, Gareth McCaughan suggested a syntax for staticmethods. You'd write class C(object): def static(arg) [staticmethod]: return 1 + arg C.static(2) => 3 The way this works is that the above becomes syntactic sugar for roughly: class C(object): def $temp(arg): return 1 + arg static = staticmethod($temp) Anyway, I thought this was a reasonably pythonic idea, so I implemented it, and thought I'd mention it here. Patch at: http://starship.python.net/crew/mwh/hacks/meth-syntax-sugar.diff Some other things that become possible:

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class D(object): ... def x(self) [property]: ... return "42" ... hello! D().x '42'

(the hello! is a debugging printf I haven't taken out yet...)

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def published(func): ... func.publish = 1 ... return func ... def m() [published]: ... print "hiya!" ... hello! m.publish 1

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def hairy_constant() [apply]: ... return math.cos(1 + math.log(34)) ... hello! hairy_constant -0.18495734252481616

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def memoize(func): ... cache = {} ... def f(*args): ... try: ... return cache[args] ... except: ... return cache.setdefault(args, func(*args)) ... return f ... def fib(a) [memoize]: ... if a < 2: return 1 ... return fib(a-1) + fib(a-2) ... hello! fib(40) 165580141 # fairly quickly

I'm not sure all of these are Good Things (esp. the [apply] one...). OTOH, I think the idea is worth discussion (or squashing by Guido :). Cheers, M. -- For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong. -- H. L. Mencken