[Python-Dev] pep 318, Decorators for Functions, Methods and Classes

[Simon Percivall]

I just wanted to say that I believe it should be allowed to decorate
classes. There's not reason enough (reading the thread linked to by the
PEP) to limit decorators this way. Like said several times in that
thread, metaclasses are harder (to write and to understand) than
decorators.

Also, considering that you said you would have actually wanted
docstrings above the definition of a function, wouldn't this apply
to classes as well?

Anyway, it's an artificial limit and it would be better to be able
to test it out during the alpha.

//Simon

> Guido van Rossum wrote:
> >
> > Some people have argued that it should work for classes (Java and C#
> > decorators work for any declaration).  I've never been convinced,
> > although I'm not dead set against it either.
> >
> > It would seem that the functionality isn't quite as useful there; you
> > can get most of the same effects with metaclasses.  I'm not aware of
> > any idiom that takes a class and passes it through some kind of
> > wrapper or transformation *after* the class declaration; if somebody
> > is using this, it surely must be a very rare use indeed.
> >