On 11/2/12 10:21 AM, Peter Otten wrote:
Martin Hewitson wrote:
On 2, Nov, 2012, at 09:40 AM, Mark Lawrence <breamore...@yahoo.co.uk>
wrote:
20 lines of documentation per method? As far as I'm concerned that's not
a smell, that's a stink.
Wow, I don't think I've ever been criticised before for writing too much
documentation :)
I guess we have different end users. This is not a set of classes for
other developers to use: it's a set of classes which creates a data
analysis environment for scientists to use. They are not programmers, and
expect the algorithms to be documented in detail.
While I would never discourage thorough documentation you may be better off
with smaller docstrings and the details in an external document. Python
projects typically use rst-files processed by sphinx.
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Sphinx/
In the science/math community, we tend to build the Sphinx API reference from
the thorough, authoritative docstrings. We like having complete docstrings
because we are frequently at the interactive prompt. We tend to have broad APIs,
so having a single source of documentation and not repeating ourselves is important.
http://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/reference/index.html
http://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/index.html
http://www.sagemath.org/doc/reference/
http://docs.sympy.org/0.7.2/modules/index.html
http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/classes.html
--
Robert Kern
"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
an underlying truth."
-- Umberto Eco
--
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
