Advanced Python Programming

The Decorator Pattern

As we saw in the previous chapter, using an adapter, a first structural design pattern, you can adapt an object implementing a given interface to implement another interface. This is called interface adaptation and includes the kinds of patterns that encourage composition over inheritance, and it could bring benefits when you have to maintain a large codebase.

A second interesting structural pattern to learn about is the decorator pattern, which allows a programmer to add responsibilities to an object dynamically, and in a transparent manner (without affecting other objects).

There is another reason why this pattern is interesting to us, as you will see in a minute.

As Python developers, we can write decorators in a ...