[steveklabnik]

> As a Pythonista I have no idea what the Ruby snippet is doing.

Fair enough. Arguing over beauty is silly anyway, I just wanted to point out that the entire thing is entirely subjective.

> The Python 3 version is using a function annotation.

Thanks, checking out PEP 3107 now. I've always seen annotations done with the @annotation syntax like the Python 2 snippet has.

[algorias]

> Thanks, checking out PEP 3107 now. I've always seen annotations done with the @annotation syntax like the Python 2 snippet has.

The @ syntax is for decorators. Different beast altogether.

[steveklabnik]

Ah. So, Python uses the Java annotation syntax for decorators? Hm. One more thing I'll have to look into when I get the time.

[rbanffy]

Actually, I think Java uses Python decoration syntax for annotations, but I have been wrong before.

[pmiller2]

I'm pretty sure Python picked it up after Java did. But, I don't think it's a case of imitation; it's just that the glyph '@' happened not to have syntactic meaning attached to it and it looks okay.

[blasdel]

No, they're exactly the same beast!

I've used decorators to add attributes to function objects in several projects in the past -- you don't have to wrap the original.