tweaking @decorator syntax

[Hallvard B Furuseth]

Andrew Durdin wrote:

> it is
> not at all obvious to me that it is rather a kind of attribute or
> modifier of the following function definition. I don't know of any
> other construction in Python that performs a similar, unmarked (i.e.
> non-explicit) modification of the following statement.

Right.  Today, both the human and the compiler can parse that kind of
thing just by looking at the indentation.

Still, if we do get a new way to indicate that something is parsed
differently, then a special character like @ would be good for that.
'@some-directive' in general could be a statement which the compiler
reacts to in some way, and decorators could be a special case:
  @decorator <decorator_name>
instead of just
  @<decorator_name>

That gives the human reader a keyword he can relate to instead of a
special character with an obscure meaning, and the @ character tells
him that there is something special about this statement.

Though in the case of decorators, I still prefer several of the other
suggestions over this one.

-- 
Hallvard