PEP-0318

[John Roth]

"Skip Montanaro" <skip at pobox.com> wrote in message
news:mailman.1459.1092154652.5135.python-list at python.org...
>
>     >> Do people anticipate having lots of decorators for a given
function?
>
>     Mark> The way they've been talking, it would appear so.
>
> Most of the lots-of-decorator examples were probably designed to make a
> competing decorator proposal look bad. ;-)
>
> In reality, I think the number of functions acquiring decorators will be
> fairly small unless you go whole hog for something like the
> accepts()/returns() example in PEP 318 or do lots of Objective C
interfacing
> as Bob Ippolito expects to do.  In places where decorators will be used, I
> suspect their number will typically be smaller than the number of
parameters
> to the decorated functions.  A quick scan of the standard library:
>
>     find . -name '*.py' \
>     | xargs cat \
>     | egrep '^ *def .*\(.*\):$' \
>     | sed -e 's/.*(//' -e 's/).*//' \
>     | python -c 'import sys
>     for l in sys.stdin:
>       l = l.strip()
>       if not l: print 0
>       else: print len(l.split())
>     ' | sort -n | uniq -c
>
> suggests that most functions have three or fewer parameters:
>
>     1096 0
>     8072 1
>     4024 2
>     1696 3
>      981 4
>      278 5
>       76 6
>       57 7
>        8 8
>       10 9
>        5 10
>        1 11
>        1 13
>
> Even if you account for functions whose parameter lists span multiple
lines
> I doubt that distribution will change very much.
>
> My guess is that use of decorators will be even more heavily weighted
toward
> 0, even after a number of Python releases.

One additional use case for decorators: prototype object systems.
I've been experimenting with Hans Nowak's system, and I am now
quite looking forward to having a single decorator that will bind the
function into an instance. For example:

@instancemethod(myinstance)
def go(self, wordList):
    ---stuff---

The result is that the function gets wrapped by new.instancemethod
and bound into the instance that's bound to myinstance.

For a program that uses this style of objects, just about every
module level function will be decorated.

John Roth
>
> Skip