Using metaclasses to play with decorators.

David Fraser davidf at sjsoft.com
Wed Jun 23 03:52:41 EDT 2004


David MacQuigg wrote:
> On Sun, 20 Jun 2004 14:48:23 -0400, "Colin J. Williams"
> <cjw at sympatico.ca> wrote:
> 
> 
>>I have yet to wrap my mind around decorators.
> 
> 
> Decorators are very simple.  They are just a way to provide different
> forms of methods, without introducing a new keyword, or some other
> more awkward syntax.
> 
> Say you wanted to define a method that didn't have 'self' as its first
> argument.  You could add a new keyword to the language:
> 
> noself methodA(x,y):
> 	return x + y
> 
> Or you could add a "decorator" to the existing syntax:
> 
> def methodA(x,y) [noself]:
> 	return x + y
> 
> Change 'noself' to 'staticmethod' and you have one of the current
> proposals in PEP318.
> 
> Don't get distracted by 'staticmethod' and other mumbo-jumbo
> terminology, and you should have no problem with decorators.

Aren't there other people around who would find
staticmethod methodA(x,y):
   return x+y
a clearer and more helpful syntax than
def methodA(x,y) [staticmethod]:
	return x + y

I've always wanted a
method A(x,y):
   self.var += x*y
which automatically declared self as an initial parameter...

David



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