[Python-Dev] decorator support

[Michael Chermside]

Raymond Hettinger writes:
> In my experiments with decorators, it is common to wrap the original
> function with a new function.
>
> After creating the new function, there are efforts to make it
> look like
> the old:
    [...]
> All is well and good except the argspec.  Running help() on the new
> function gives:
    [...]
> So, it would be nice if there were some support for carrying
> forward the
> argspec to inform help(), calltips(), and inspect().

I created something to help address this... the "obvious" solution
of a decorator used for making decorators. It's example #6 in:
   http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/moinmoin/PythonDecoratorLibrary

Currently it doesn't handle argspec, but I propose adding argspec
(it'll be slightly tricky, but shouldn't be impossible), then
including it in a "decorators" package. Until we have a decorators
package, I think it can live in the wiki and/or the cookbook.

If asked to do so, I'll see about updating this to fix the argspec.
If not asked to, I'll probably leave it alone, because as-is it is
simple enough to serve as a decent example as well as being useful
but with argspec handling it would be complex enough to be useful
but too complex to be a good example to learn from.

-- Michael Chermside