[Python-Dev] PEP 318 - check for consensus

[Jewett, Jim J]

The decorator discussion has gotten lively again, 
and a summary would be a long list of options.

I'm hoping that at least some of the decisions are
non-controversial.  If you have an opinion on the 
following, please email me directly (to not clutter 
the list).  If several people disagree (or some
disagree strongly), I'll consider the issue still
undecided.

	Issue 1:  When is the name bound?

The current proposal is that the name does not get
bound until after the final decorator is applied.
This means that decorators do not have access to
the function by its name.  

They can learn the name, perhaps through sys._getframe, 
but the name will not yet be bound, unless it happens
to refer to an unrelated object.  (See issue two for
a better way to get the name.)

Does anyone feel strongly that the name should be 
bound to the original function before decorators are
applied?

Does anyone feel strongly that the name should be
bound to the result of each intermediate step, if
there are multiple decorators?

	Issue 2:  Restrictions on decorators

The working assumption had been "any callable, which
will be called with a single object as the argument"

	Issue 2a:  name of the entry point

Is there a strong feeling (in any direction) about 
calling the decorator's "decorate" or "__decorate__"
attribute, rather than its "__call__" attribute?

	Issue 2b:  context available to decorators

Would there be any objection to passing additional
context as keywords?  

decorate(object, name="myfunc")

The obvious keywords are the name and the context's
globals; decorators should probably accept arbitrary
keywords for forward-compatibility.

-jJ