[Python-ideas] Problems (and solutions?) in writing decorators

[Sylvain MARIE]

Stephen

> If the answer is "maybe", IMO PyPI is the right solution for distribution.

Very wise words, I understand this point.
However as of today it is *not* possible to write such a library in a complete way, without an additional tool from the language itself. Trust me, I tried very hard :). Indeed `my_decorator(foo)` when foo is a callable will always look like `@my_decorator` applied to function foo, because that's how the language is designed. So there is always one remaining ambiguous case to cover, and I have to rely on some ugly tricks such as asking users for a custom disambiguator.

So if the decision is to let community-provided libraries like `decopatch` solve this problem, would you please consider providing us with the missing information? For example a new method in the `inspect` package could be `inspect.is_decorator_call(frame)`, that would return True if and only if the given frame is a decorator usage call as in `@my_decorator`. That piece would be enough - I would gladly take care of the rest in `decopatch`.

Thanks for the feedback !

Sylvain

-----Message d'origine-----
De : Stephen J. Turnbull <turnbull.stephen.fw at u.tsukuba.ac.jp> 
Envoyé : vendredi 15 mars 2019 04:56
À : Sylvain MARIE <sylvain.marie at se.com>
Cc : David Mertz <mertz at gnosis.cx>; python-ideas <python-ideas at python.org>
Objet : Re: [Python-ideas] Problems (and solutions?) in writing decorators

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Sylvain MARIE via Python-ideas writes:

 > I totally understand your point of view. However on the other hand,  > many very popular open source projects out there have the opposite  > point of view and provide decorators that can seamlessly be used  > with and without arguments (pytest, attrs, click, etc.). So after a  > while users get used to this behavior and expect it from all  > libraries. Making it easy to implement is therefore something quite  > important for developers not to spend time on this useless  > “feature”.

That doesn't follow.  You can also take it that "educating users to know the difference between a decorator and a decorator factory is therefore something quite important for developers not to spend time on this useless 'feature'."

I'm not a fan of either position.  I don't see why developers of libraries who want to provide this to their users shouldn't have "an easy way to do it", but I also don't see a good reason to encourage syntactic ambiguity by providing it in the standard library.  I think this is a feature that belongs in the area of "you *could* do it, but
*should* you?"  If the answer is "maybe", IMO PyPI is the right solution for distribution.

Steve

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