Well, copying and pasting this text, and changing <<<NAME>>> to Foo so that its a legal Python identifier (why did you not want to name your class, out of curiosity), I get no problems with this.
class Foo: def digest(): ''' char[28] digest ( ) Return the digest of the strings passed to the update() method so far. This is a 28-byte string which may contain non-ASCII characters, including null bytes. ''' raise NotImplementedError, 'digest() is not yet implemented.' >>> foo = Foo() >>> foo <__main__.Foo instance at 0x00B30C38> So all I can suggest is that you have accidentally mixed double and single quotes, or there is a quote mark somewhere in the docstring in your copy of the code, or some strange, platform/system/text editor/etc specific bug is causing this, or i don't know what else. Oh and btw, I suspect, form the lack of @staticmethod on the line above def digest():, that you perhaps meant def digest(self): ? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list