An idea for making willie callables syntax better.

[ari-koivula]

Decorators could be added to willie, so that modules could use those as a standard way of declaring willie callables. They would simply add the attributes to a function, so all old modules would still work. They could later be extended to do other things, such as wrapping functions to a WillieCallable object or something.

This would also have the benefit of working nicely with IDEs, as you would get docstrings and code-completion for the decorators.

• Make decorators for adding attributes to willie callables
  I think a new module should be made for these, meant to house things that are imported from willie modules. I would suggest "willie.module". Optionally, these could be imported to willie package for shorter syntax, but I would rather not import willie itself into a module, even if that doesn't do any harm.

import willie
# import willie.module  # I like this better.
@willie.rule(".*")
@willie.module.rule(".*")
def my_callable(bot, trigger):

• Convert all basic modules to the new format.
  As an example for those that want to make willie modules. As I think it is preferable to adding magic attributes to function objects.
• Add type-checking to the new decorators.
  The interface for some of these attributes is a bit complicated, so I think it would be nice to be able to run the individual module without willie and see that they are indeed in a format accepted by willie. I'm mostly talking about rule here, as it can be a regexp string or one of a few different kinds of tupples.

[elad661]

Merged. Do we want the other two items blocking 4.0?

[embolalia]

I don't think we need to worry about type/value checking, and the conversion of existing modules is covered by issue #272, so I'm closing this.