@decorators

[Roy Smith]

A few random comments:

I really dislike the proposed syntax, for two main reasons.  First, I 
don't like the idea of inventing new uses for punctuation (down that 
road lies perl).  Second, I don't like the idea that you're creating a 
contextual block which violates (or at least ignores) the normal 
indenting rules.

I just went to read pep-318 in its entirety, and discovered that the 
last modified date is only a few hours ago.  People might want to go 
read the latest version.

I'm also wondering about doc strings.  Doc strings are really metadata, 
and if the idea of decorators is to build a uniform way to handle 
metadata, it would be nice to see it somehow include docstrings.  There 
are clearly backward compatability issues to worry about, however.

I'm also thinking about programming by contract.  It seems like the pre- 
and post-condition assertions could also be thought of as meta-data.  
Some of the examples in the PEP hint at doing this, but don't address 
things contract inheritance.  Has there been any discussion of this?

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I'm rather distressed at the tone 
of some of the postings I've seen here over the past couple of days.  
Some of the sentiments I've seen expressed are downright rude, 
combative, and accusatory.  These sorts of things are way out of line.

Come on folks.  It should be possible to express an opinion, even a 
strongly held one, without resorting to accusations of sinister plots or 
evil intent.  I may not like the proposal, but at the same time I'm 
hugely appreciative of the hard work put in by the folks who proposed 
it, paid their own way to go to meetings where it was discussed, wrote 
the code, did the builds, etc, etc.  They deserve accolades, not 
hostility.