Purely emotional perspective

[Peter Hansen]

Jeff Shannon wrote:

> Personally, I'm seeing more and more usefulness in decorators as the 
> discussion progresses, and I'm seeing more reasons why the most obvious 
> alternatives to the currently proposed syntax are not optimal.  But I 
> still find the current syntax to be *extremely* (painfully) 
> uncomfortable -- this sort of prefix syntax is unlike anything else *I* 
> can think of in Python.

That's precisely my feeling at this point as well.  Oddly
enough, I think with the slight change to use | instead of
@ (or perhaps even Barry's preferred =) it would be easier to
swallow.  Fundamentally though it is things like the strangeness
of these lines that are somehow "bound" to the following (next)
function definition, yet have no connection to it other than
coming at the same indentation level.  (At least the | syntax
does feel like it has a visual "link" to the following def.)

And the reversed order of application (non-intuitive, I feel).

And the restriction to dotted names instead of arbitrary expressions,
making it feel even more weird and non-Pythonic (and that in spite
of the workarounds that have been shown for perhaps all cases
anyway).

And other subtleties.

> I'm particularly worried about the proposals of using this as metadata 
> for things like author -- that seems to be begging for almost every 
> function to use half a dozen or more decorators (accepts, returns, 
> author, design date, last revision date, etc., etc.) which will (IMO) 
> seriously degrade code readability.  (This syntax is okay for one or two 
> decorators, but more than that quickly becomes obfuscatory.)

This paragraph also seemed worth leaving in. :-)

-Peter