Mathias Panzenböck wrote:
It is a very common case to return a nested function, e.g. in a decorator:
def deco(f): def _f(*args,**kwargs): do_something() try: return f(*args,**kwargs) finally: do_something_different() return _f
Is is really that common? In this case, you are misrepresenting the pattern. The appropriate version of this would require references to _f to make it's signature match that of f's, and therefore this entire argument is specious. In reality, the number of times you can get away with returning a truly anonymous function (that isn't a glorified lambda) is rare, I think. def deco(f): def _f(*args,**kawrgs): ... functools.update_wrapper(_f, f) return _f Or: def deco(f): @functools.wraps(f) def _f(*args,**kawrgs): ... return _f Even in the second case, it would be awkward to inline with the return statement because of the need to invoke a decorator. -Scott -- Scott Dial scott@scottdial.com scodial@cs.indiana.edu