On 06/07/16 20:35, bruce wrote: > Saw the decorator thread earlier.. didn't want to pollute it. I know, I > could google! > > But, what are decorators, why are decorators? who decided you needed them!
decorators are things that modify functions in standard ways. Specifically they are functions that act on functions. Mostly people think of them as being the thing that comes after an @ sign, but in fact they are just functions but with a bit of syntactic sugar to make them more readable. You don't really *need* them as a feature, but if you have the ability to treat functions as values they are a useful technique. Most Python programmers don't implement decorators they just use the standard ones. But as the thread showed implementing them is not too difficult once you get happy with the idea of passing functions around as arguments to other functions. As to who suggested them you'd need to go back through the PEPs to see who first suggested it, and then maybe more to see who's idea finally got accepted. I think it was in Python 2.5. -- Alan G Author of the Learn to Program web site http://www.alan-g.me.uk/ http://www.amazon.com/author/alan_gauld Follow my photo-blog on Flickr at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/alangauldphotos _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
