I've just been playing around with metaclasses, and I think I've stumbled across a reason for having class decorators as an alternative to metaclasses for some purposes.
The metaclass I wrote was for the purpose of adding a class to a registry, the reason for which isn't important here. It worked, but I was surprised to find that it not only registered the classes that I made it the metaclass of, but all subclasses of those classes as well. I'm not sure whether that's really the behaviour I want, and I can imagine some cases in which it's definitely not what I'd want. The general principle brought out here is that when you use a metaclass, it gets inherited by subclasses, but if we had class decorators, they would only affect to the classes that you explicitly applied them to. I think there are uses for both behaviours. Greg _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
