Decorators Versus Manager Functions
Regardless of such subtleties, the Tracer class decorator example ultimately still relies on __getattr__ to intercept fetches on a wrapped and embedded instance object. As we saw earlier, all we’ve really accomplished is moving the instance creation call inside a class, instead of passing the instance into a manager function. With the original nondecorator tracing example, we would simply code instance creation differently:
class Spam: # Non-decorator version
... # Any class will do
food = Wrapper(Spam()) # Special creation syntax
@Tracer
class Spam: # Decorator version
... # Requires @ syntax at class
food = Spam() # Normal creation syntax
Essentially, class decorators shift special syntax requirements from the instance creation call to the class statement itself. This is also true for the singleton example earlier in this section—rather than decorating a class and using normal instance creation calls, we could simply pass the class and its construction arguments into a manager function:
instances = {}
def getInstance(aClass, *args):
if aClass not in instances:
instances[aClass] = aClass(*args)
return instances[aClass]
bob = getInstance(Person, 'Bob', 40, 10) # Versus: bob = Person('Bob', 40, 10)
Alternatively, we could use Python’s introspection facilities to fetch the class from an already-created instance (assuming creating an initial instance is acceptable):
instances = {}
def getInstance(object):
aClass = object.__class__
if aClass not in instances:
instances[aClass] = object
return instances[aClass]
bob = getInstance(Person('Bob', 40, 10)) # Versus: bob = Person('Bob', 40, 10)
The same holds true for function decorators like the tracer we wrote earlier: rather than decorating a function with logic that intercepts later calls, we could simply pass the function and its arguments into a manager that dispatches the call:
def func(x, y): # Nondecorator version
... # def tracer(func, args): ... func(*args)
result = tracer(func, (1, 2)) # Special call syntax
@tracer
def func(x, y): # Decorator version
... # Rebinds name: func = tracer(func)
result = func(1, 2) # Normal call syntax
Manager function approaches like this place the burden of using special syntax on calls, instead of expecting decoration syntax at function and class definitions.
