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Comment by ekiru | Hacker News Reader

How is this so? Decorators are just syntactic sugar for defining a function then replacing it with the result of calling another function (the decorator) on it.

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The decorator can do introspection on the function object. This project uses the idea to execute (some) Python code on the GPU:

http://code.google.com/p/copperhead/

> The decorator can do introspection on the function object.

so can normal (i.e. not using decorators) code after the the function, e.g.:

   def myFunction(x):
      blah
   doSomethingWith(myFunction)

Here, doSomethingWith() can introspect on myFunction()

Ah, yes - of course decorators do not fundamentally increase the expressive power of the language (and neither do lambdas, obviously). It's all just a matter of convenience and elegance, which are in the eye of the beholder anyway...

Which being able to wrap the function definition in a function call could accomplish. Unfortunately that's not the direction the Python team wants to take the language.

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