[Python-Dev] Re: PEP 318: Decorators last before colon

[Guido van Rossum]

> How about INDENT[...]:DEDENT?  <0.5 serious>

Alas, won't work -- if the decoration is the first thing in a class
body, you'd have something starting with double indent, but the lexer
never gives you that.

class C:

        [staticmethod]
    def foo():
        pass

This would be tokenized as

'class'
'C'
':'
NEWLINE
INDENT
'['
'staticmethod'
']'
NEWLINE
<ILLEGAL DEDENT>

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)