PEP 3174 got me to thinking. There is now a subdirectory to deposit as many *.pyc files as you want without cluttering the source directory (never mind the default case). Which means you can pretty much write files with impunity.
So I was wondering: what about a separate file just for docstrings. __doc__ would become a descriptor that loads the docstring from the file whenever it is referenced. The vast majority of the time docstrings just take up memory and do nothing, so why not lazy load those things? Yes I know you can use the -OO switch to omit docstrings--but who does that anyway? I know I never use -O because I don't know if the people who wrote the library code I'm using were careful enough not to perform general checks with assert or to avoid relying on the docstring's presense. Yeah, it's probably a miniscule optimization, but whatever, I'm just throwing it out there. Carl Banks -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
