What's the best method for annotating attributes with a docstring? I'm looking to be able to introspect my class & get the comments back out.
The technique I'm using is a little hoaky, but works.. basically I create subclasses of the builtin types that I want to be able to use & then instantiate them in my attribute assignments. This gives me an object that I can tweak the __doc__ attribute on. An example of what my code looks like is included below. I saw that PEP 224 [1] was trying to meet this need, but got rejected because the proposed syntax wasn't clear enough. Thanks! -Ken [1] http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0224/ attr_doc.py:: # Subclass str so we can modify instance's attributes (like __doc__) class _(str): pass # Boolean gave me extra fits that I don't understand, but this technique works class MyBool(int): def __str__(self): return `self.__int__() > 0` def __repr__(self): return self.__str__() def bool_func(val): def blah(): return MyBool(val) return blah true = bool_func(True) false = bool_func(False) class Animal(object): four_legs = true() four_legs.__doc__ = "Animal has four legs" favorite_food = _('cheese') favorite_food.__doc__ = "Animal's favorite food" has_fur = true() has_fur.__doc__ = "Animal has fur" print Animal.four_legs.__doc__, '::', Animal.four_legs print Animal.favorite_food.__doc__, '::', Animal.favorite_food print Animal.has_fur.__doc__, '::', Animal.has_fur ------ This gives the expected results: Animal has four legs :: True Animal's favorite food :: cheese Animal has fur :: True -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
