Python 201: Decorating the main function
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Join For FreeLast week, I was reading Brett Cannon’s blog where he talks about function signatures and decorating the main function. I didn’t follow everything he talked about, but I thought the concept was really interesting. The following code is an example based on a recipe that Mr. Cannon mentioned. I think it illustrates what he’s talking about, but basically if provides a way to remove the standard
if __name__ == "__main__": doSomething()
Anyway, here’s the code.
#---------------------------------------------------------------------- def doSomething(name="Mike"): """""" print "Welcome to the program, " + name #---------------------------------------------------------------------- def main(f): """""" if f.__module__ == '__main__': f() return f main(doSomething)
The nice part about this is that the main function can be anywhere in the code. If you like to use decorators, then you can re-write this as follows:
#---------------------------------------------------------------------- def main(f): """""" if f.__module__ == '__main__': f() return f #---------------------------------------------------------------------- @main def doSomething(name="Mike"): """""" print "Welcome to the program, " + nameNote that the main function has to come before you can decorate the doSomething function. I’m not sure how or even if I would use this sort of trick, but I thought it might be fun to experiment with at some point.
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