[Tutor] real world decorators

Eike Welk eike.welk at gmx.net
Mon Sep 21 00:43:32 CEST 2009


On Sunday 20 September 2009, John wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I think I understand what decorators are and how they work.  Maybe
> it's just me but I don't know where I'd use them in my real world
> programming.  I see how they work with profile or coverage but does
> anyone have real world uses.

Frequently used are @classmethod and @staticmethod:
http://docs.python.org/library/functions.html#classmethod

An other interesting usage of decorators is Phillip J. 
Eby's 'simplegeneric' library, where decorated functions replace big 
if... elif... constructions:
http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi/simplegeneric/0.6

But really decorators are just syntactical sugar. They are an elegant 
way to write a special case of a function call. 

Kind regards,
Eike.


More information about the Tutor mailing list