[Python-Dev] Re: PEP 318: Decorators last before colon

[Simon Percivall]

On 2004-04-06, at 01.24, David Eppstein wrote:
>
> Ok, then how about
>     <decorator>
>     def ...
> ?
>
> '<' can't start an expression or statement currently, can it?

Yeah. I think that would look better. On the other hand ...

On 2004-03-31, at 17.42, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> Why does <...> look better than [...]?  To me, <...> just reminds me
> of XML, which is totally the wrong association.
>
> There are several parsing problems with <...>: the lexer doesn't see <
> and > as matched brackets, so you won't be able to break lines without
> using a backslash, and the closing > is ambiguous -- it might be a
> comparison operator.