Are decorators really that different from metaclasses...

[Anthony Baxter]

On Thu, 2 Sep 2004 15:48:19 +0000 (UTC), Steven Bethard
<steven.bethard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Not to defend Paul's proposal, which I, like many others on this list, still
> find counterintuitive and a break with the current syntax/semantics of Python,
> but I don't think it's fair to say that his proposal will change much
> currently legal code.  Grep the Python source for functions with __*__ local
> variable assignments and tell me how many you find.  I wasn't able to find
> any, though perhaps my skills with grep are not up to par...  For that matter,
> grep any Python source for functions like this.  I'd bet you find the same.

My arguments against it were nothing to do with breaking existing
code, but were to do with the half-baked nature of the proposal. It's
fairly clear (to me) that it's really not been thought through - Jeff
Epler's code samples showed some of the stupid results that this
proposal would produce.

I stand by my earlier comments that this is all just hand-waving and
fluff. There's been little concrete effort by Paul to actually spell
out his proposal.