[Tutor] Declaration order of classes... why it is important?

[Mac Ryan]

On Wed, 2009-08-26 at 15:46 -0400, Dave Angel wrote:
> So define a classmethod to finish the job, and invoke it later
> 
> class Employee(object):
>     @classmethod
>     def finish(cls):
>         cls.__storm_table__ = "employee"
>         cls.company_id = []
>         cls.company = Company.id         #where Company is a forward 
> reference
>         del cls.finish      #remove this method so it won't be called a 
> second time
> 
> class Company:
>     id = 42
> 
> Employee.finish()   #This finishes initializing the class
> 
> 
> help(Employee)
> print Employee.company_id

First things first, thank you Wayne, Kent and Dave for your extensive
and complementary explanations. As many things in python, what it seemed
obscure at first now - with your help - seems perfectly obvious.

Second thing: the example that Dave gave me and that I left quoted above
makes use of decorators, but this is something that I still do not
understand. I believe I got a grasp of the concept of metaclasses, to
which the concept of decorator seems to be related, but the official
documentation is a a bit obscure for me.

I don't want to steal your time asking for an explanation that probably
is already somewhere out there, but my google searches did not return
anything useful (I assume I am using the wrong keywords here), so if you
have a good pointer for me, I would be very grateful. :)

Mac.