[Tutor] what does the "@" operator mean?

[Marc Tompkins]

On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 5:03 PM, Alan Gauld <alan.gauld at btinternet.com> wrote:
>
> "Marc Tompkins" <marc.tompkins at gmail.com> wrote
>
>> If you're just starting out in Python, decorators can be hard to get
>> your head around...
>
> I've been using Python for oover 10 years and still find decorators
> hard to get my head around! :-)
>
> I confess I'm not a fan, they go against the Python spirit of
> explicit is best in my opinion. If I'm calling a function I like to
> know I'm calling a function... I know they make the code look
> pretty but IMHO they are a pain to debug and I'm never totally
> convinced I've got it exactly right.
>
> Alan G
>
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I'm sorry I left it as flat as I did - that Dr. Dobbs article is a
pretty good explanation, and there's an article somewhere in the
Effbot bookshelf that does a decent job - but I couldn't find either
one at that moment.

I've only been using Python for a couple of years now, but my
experience so far is the same as yours: decorators make my head hurt.
Even in the Dr. Dobbs article, the examples seem horribly contrived.
There must be plenty of programmers who use decorators all the time
and would feel lost without them, but I have yet to see a compelling
use case.  (It's always something like "Here's another useless,
made-up situation.  We could handle it in a straightforward way, but
wouldn't it be cooler if we used a decorator instead?")

Actually, I'm being unnecessarily harsh: I can imagine a theoretical
case, where there is some operation you wish to apply to several
functions, and you don't want to write the code more than once.
(Wrapping a timer around functions comes to mind.)  But I've never run
across a situation where a decorator actually seemed like the best way
to do it, and (almost) all of the articles on the subject feel like
they were written to check an action item off the editor's to-do list:
this book won't be complete unless we mention decorators, so better
slop something together.

Does anybody who reads this list use decorators and have a nice word
to say about them?  I'd be interested to hear it.

-- 
www.fsrtechnologies.com

p.s. - Is anybody else as sick of the phrase "syntactic sugar" as I am?