Introduction to Python Decorators

An excellent tutorial/answer about python decorators was posted on stack overflow:<p><a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/739654/understanding-python-decorators/1594484#1594484" rel="nofollow">http://stackoverflow.com/questions/739654/understanding-pyth...</a>

The only thing I'd like to see more of with respect to decorators is discussion of real benefits. The concept is fairly simple it's the technique and resulting code organization that is interesting. Much like Lisp macros, it's important to know when not to use them and none of the tutorials I've seen really address that.

The only thing that I might ever want from functional and symbolic programming paradigms that I can't imagine how to emulate with decorators would be the ability to transform the actual compiled function object in some way. Python decorators can add lots of new code, sure, but they don't get access to the syntax tree for the function object to be able to break it apart and transform it.<p>Mind you, I truly love Python decorators, but I just don't think the comparison to languages like LISP quite holds up. Maybe I'm just inexperienced, though...

Just me, or do others think any tutorial about python decorators ought to introduce and encourage the use of functools.wraps() ?

A library of Python decorators: <a href="http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonDecoratorLibrary" rel="nofollow">http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonDecoratorLibrary</a>