Sorry for the late reply. We experienced a 3 day blackout following one of the most amazing thunderstorms I've witnessed in my life.
On Tue, 24 Mar 2015 22:49:49 +1100, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: >On Tue, 24 Mar 2015 07:55 pm, Mario Figueiredo wrote: > >> Reading PEP 257 and 258 I got the impression that I could document >> module attributes and these would be available in the __doc__ >> attribute of the object. > >PEP 258 is rejected, so you can't take that as definitive. Ah! That explains it then. Thank you. (Also learned to start paying more attention to the status field). > >PEP 257 has this definition very early in the document: > > A docstring is a string literal that occurs as the first > statement in a module, function, class, or method definition. > > >Nothing there about documenting arbitrary attributes. That did get me a little confused. But since PEP 258 required PEP 257, I just assumed the former would redefine the latter and didn't make much of the apparent contradiction. > >Even if there was support from the compiler to extract the docstring, where >would it be stored? Consider: > >spam = None >"""Spammy goodness.""" >eggs = None >"""Scrambled, not fried.""" > >There's only one None object, and even if it could take a docstring (and it >can't), which docstring would it get? Presumably the second, which would >make help(spam) confusing, but when we say eggs = 23 the docstring would >disappear too. This is a byproduct of me still thinking in terms of C variables. When I first read that paragraph of yours, it didn't make sense to me -- "What is he talking about? I'm documenting the spam and eggs identifiers, not the None object". But when I was trying to reply to you by mounting a case around writing directly to the __doc__ attribute of the spam and eggs identifiers, the python shell was quick to make me realized my foolishness, and I remembered about Python variables not being the same as C variables. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
