You are confusing the implementation and the syntax. It's a special syntactical construct (an annotation) that gets translated into function calls that amount t

You are confusing the implementation and the syntax. It's a special syntactical construct (an annotation) that gets translated into function calls that amount to doing AOP type things around the call to the original function. That's more or less how annotations work in other languages too. Some do it with reflection, some do it at compile time, etc. The goal is the same: get rid of the drudgery of spelling out the function call in order to introduce the side effect in the form of a thing that gets called before/after/around another thing. Not against that btw. and I always appreciated how pragmatic python can be with a lot of things.