[Python-ideas] Assignment decorators (Re: The Descriptor Protocol...)

[MRAB]

On 10/03/2011 19:02, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 11:41 AM, Paul Moore<p.f.moore at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> On 10 March 2011 12:49, Nick Coghlan<ncoghlan at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>> I actually agree it is a major weakness of the syntax. You can play
>>> games with "from" to rearrange the line. For example:
>>>
>>> def name from builder(param_spec):
>>>   code_block
>>>
>>> as sugar for:
>>>
>>> name = builder("name", param_spec_obj, code_obj)
>>
>> Yes, I like that better...
>
> I'd like it better if it came with a default builder implementation
> that would create regular functions, so that
>
> def name(<params>):
>    <block>
>
> was equivalent to
>
> def name from<defaultbuilder>(<params>):
>    <block>
>
> But I don't see a reasonable way to do that.
>
> Also I think it's confusing to have both
>
> @some_magic
> def name(<params>): ...
>
> and
>
> def name from some_magic(<params): ...
>
> with different semantics.
>
Talking about different semantics, I had an (admittedly vague) idea
about passing the body of a def statement to a builder as a string at
runtime, allowing 'foreign' code to be embedded more easily.

In a statement of the form:

     def name(...) from builder:
         ...

the body of the def wouldn't be parsed by Python at compile time, but
would, as I said, be passed to the builder as a string at runtime. The
builder would be able to parse the string, compiling it to a callable
object with hooks into Python so that it could access variables, call
functions, etc, when it was actually executed.

For example, this:

     c.execute("""insert into stocks values (?, ?, ?, ?, ?)""", 
('2006-01-05', 'BUY', 'RHAT',100, 35.14))

could become (assuming that sqlite3 had a magic __compile__ function):

     def insert(date, trans, symbol, qty, price) from sqlite3:
         insert into stocks values (date, trans, symbol, qty, price)

     insert('2006-01-05', 'BUY', 'RHAT',100, 35.14)

When run, the SQL code would fetch the values of the parameters as
needed.

Actually, a closer match to the original code would be:

     c.insert('2006-01-05', 'BUY', 'RHAT',100, 35.14)

Clearly it's a method, so the instance would be passed as 'self',
something like this:

     def insert(self, date, trans, symbol, qty, price) from sqlite3:
         insert into stocks values (date, trans, symbol, qty, price)

but what happens to 'self' within the definition? It's not referred to
in the SQL statement itself.