[Python-Dev] 2.4a2, and @decorators

[James Y Knight]

On Aug 3, 2004, at 10:40 AM, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> I have a gut feeling about this one.  I'm not sure where it comes
> from, but I have it.

I guess I have the opposite gut feeling: special classes of expressions 
in the grammar are always bad. Michael Chermside's message said this 
better than I can.

Heck, even 'except' can take an arbitrary expression as an argument! 
Now I'm damn sure I'd never write code that says
   except FooError and f() or MyErrors[5]:
because that would be insane, but I'm glad python doesn't restrict the 
argument to some strange subset of expressions that someone decided 
were approved! Consistency of grammar is a key feature, even when it 
allows users to write insane programs.

>  It may be that I want the compiler to be able to
> recognize certain decorators.

If I understand what you're saying, it seems that you're thinking the @ 
form should be more a static declaration, not a dynamically evaluated 
expression, so that the compiler can reason about it without running 
code. However, that isn't the case even now, and if it was, it wouldn't 
fit in with the rest of the python language very well. Definitely an 
interesting idea, but I think it would require the @'s argument to be a 
compile-time macro, instead of a run-time expression. And python 
doesn't have compile-time macros. With @ taking a runtime expression, I 
don't see how the compiler could possibly do anything with its 
argument. Nothing can be guaranteed.



As a postscript, I must say I am alarmed by some comments others have 
used to justify the current restricted state. In particular 
(paraphrased), "it's good because it keeps people from using lambda", 
and "it's good because it keeps people from doing '@1+1' by mistake. 
For the first: you hate lambdas so much? They are in python -- 
arbitrarily forbidding their use in certain expressions because you 
don't like them is pretty strange. For the second: You want to do type 
checking via syntax error?! *That* is insanity. And it doesn't even 
work well (of course).

James