[Python-ideas] Re: New syntax for decorators that are compatible with both normal and async functions

On 2020-02-11 4:33 a.m., Ben Rudiak-Gould wrote:

On Mon, Feb 10, 2020 at 9:50 AM Andrew Barnert via Python-ideas wrote:

...

It’s a well-known problem that async is “contagious”: [...]

But C# and every other language that’s borrowed the idea has the same problem, and as far as I know, nobody’s thought of a good answer yet.

Threads don't have that problem: you can use non-thread-aware code with callbacks in your threaded program if you do your own locking. Haskell (GHC) doesn't have that problem: it has fibers that use a programming interface like C#/Python threads, but they're multiplexed by user-mode code within a single OS thread. 16-bit Windows didn't have that problem. Stackless and greenlet don't have that problem.

It's a problem that can be solved by just doing the obvious thing, the thing that Python already did with threads: don't define a novel syntax for coroutines, but instead use the syntax that already existed.

Async/await syntax is a static type system with two types, may-yield and will-not-yield. There's no provision for writing generic/polymorphic code over those types, so you have to write everything twice. Like any static type system it has some benefits, but I don't think it's worth the cost, especially in Python, which has always eschewed mandatory static typing.

I don't know how to fix Python now that it's gone so thoroughly down this path (starting with the yield keyword 18 years ago). But it's not a problem that ever needed to exist. Coroutines aren't that hard.

I would suggest having an "await in" operator. Or an "autowait" function: def autowait(value):   if is_awaitable(value): return value   async def force_await():     return value   return force_await() This would allow one to write "async-ready" code while calling non-async functions.

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