*.. Could you perhaps give a concrete example of a situation where a decorator would be useful for checking the inputs to a function? .. Oscar*
Say I write a function that expects 5 positional arguments, and up to 4 ** arguments. Now I want to: a- check that the first positional argument is a sorted list. If not a list, raise an error. If an unsorted list, sort it and pass to the function b- check that the 5th position argument is an 0 < int < 10 c- check that no more than 4 ** arguments are passed In the decorators-make-my-life-simple scenario I hope for, I'll simply open my box of decorators, pick 3 relevant decorators, and put the 3 @ lines above my function. In the @ for the b- test, I'll pass a 5 to tell the decorator to look at the 5th argument, and similarly a 4 for the decorator checking c-. Then I write another function, whose test requirements will be different, I'll simply pick decorators relevant to it, then go on writing more code. If this scenario works as expected, I can focus my mind on the concepts I'm working on rather than having to interrupt the flow of thoughts to write test code. *.. See the recent discussion on Test Driven Development .. Alan* Yes I followed the recent discussion about unit testing. I suppose that decorators can't do everything that a comprehensive unit testing can, but probably decorators plus a few doctests would suffice for my purpose. Trung
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