"Terry Hancock" wrote: > On Thursday 30 June 2005 09:49 am, Mike P. wrote: > > > IMHO I'm not particularly happy with the way Python is going language wise. > > I mean, I don't think I'll ever use decorators, for example. Personally, in > > terms of language features and capabilities I think the language is fine. > > Not much (if anything needs to be added). > > This though, I mostly agree with. I'm not sure if I'll ever find use for > decorators, > but the "@" signs bother me, I must admit. I liked the fact that there was a > way to do this without fiddling with the language syntax.
What way ? The foo=decorator(foo) workaround after the function's body ? That's hardly acceptable for common decorators such as staticmethod, classmethod and other suggested ones (synchronized, cached, traced, etc.). I don't mind the @ so much - I don't like it particularly either - and I don't compare it to the alternative rejected decorator syntax forms, but it's certainly an improvement over the pre-2.4 explicit assignment *after* the function. Properties are in the same boat with decorators. Although they are great semantically, the current syntax is less than optimal. Interestingly, Pyrex does much better in the readability department since 0.9 (http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg/python/Pyrex/version/Doc/extension_types.html#Properties). The Property decorator recipe (http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/410698) comes pretty close to it, but I wouldn't mind a small addition to the language syntax for something so useful as properties. Keeping the language small is a worthwhile goal, but it should be traded off with conciseness and readability; otherwise we could well be content with s-expressions. Just my $0.02, George -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
