Rather than decorators, how about sections?

[Paul Morrow]

Christophe Cavalaria wrote:

> Paul Morrow wrote:
> 
> 
>>>class Foo(object):
>>>    def spam(Foo):
>>>        print "Class Method"
> 
> 
> What is that ? It's ugly, it's a name alias and it'll be incredibly
> confusing when classmethods are inherited, which is exactly the most common
> use case for classmethods.
> 

Fine, instead of Foo (the name of the class), use the word klass.  It's 
a popular name for the first parameter of a class method.

> 
>>I like it!  It's simple, clear, ... Why isn't this the hands-down best
>>solution? Why do we want to be more verbose than necessary?
> 
> 
> It isn't a solution. It only "resolves" the problem for staticmethod and
> classmethod which are only a very small part of what we do/want to do with
> decorators.
> 

What we want to do with decorators, it appears, is to clutter up our 
code with declarations, some of which are just pragmas.  I thought we 
liked dynamic declarations (where it's obvious what's going on, as it 
would be here).

> 
> Well, it might seem strange but :
> - It will break a lot of code which use a name different than self for the
> first argument
> - It'll break all existing classmethods
> - It'll break code that binds arbitrary functions as a member function. You
> can't do things like that anymore :
> 
> 
>>>>def f(s):
>>>>    print "Hi, I'm function f"
>>>>class Klass:
>>>>    doIt = f
>>>>Klass().doIt()
> 
> 

Breaking existing code is not necessarily a bad thing.  If you worry too 
much about it, you end up with a real mess of a language.  One that's 
hard to read/write/understand.

To a junior pythonista, in your example, the way you chose 's' as the 
argument name, f looks like it might be a static method.  It would have 
been more clear to use 'self' instead.

So I think that dropping the decoration syntax for class and static 
methods, and instead requiring that we use a particular naming 
convention for their 1st arguments, we not only improve the readibility 
of our code (less arcane syntax), but the correctness of our reader's 
expectations as well.