python-decorators

What is a Python decorator?

Glossary

In the glossary page there is an entry for the term decorator:

A function returning another function, usually applied as a function transformation using the @wrapper syntax. Common examples for decorators are classmethod() and staticmethod().

The decorator syntax is merely syntactic sugar, the following two function definitions are semantically equivalent:

def f(...):
    ...
f = staticmethod(f)

@staticmethod
def f(...):
    ...

The same concept exists for classes, but is less commonly used there. See the documentation for function definitions and class definitions for more about decorators.

However, it is rather incorrect in the sense that decorators can be much more than this, and this piece of text has not changed since the Glossary page was added back in 2.6, with the exception that it now mentions classes.

We can also see that the writers of the Python docs treat decorator as a syntactic sugar, which explains why it is not extensively introduced.

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