On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 8:08 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
Decorators were one of the biggest successes in recent years, so we would be foolish to dismiss the idea of simplifying them out of hand. But I think you are doing yourself a disservice by referring to this proposal as "new syntax". Normally when people talk about syntax, they are referring to language syntax (i.e. a change to the Python interpreter), and we're pretty conservative about adding new syntax.
You are right. I've mostly used the expression "new-style decorators" (which corresponds to the idea of "new idiom" that you propose) but I guess that there are still a couple of unwanted "new syntax" in the post. At the beginning of the post, I say that "no existing syntax is broken", so the proposal does not change anything for the interpreter. Moreover, the old idiom can be used in combination with the new one, so no existing code can be broken by the proposal. CS