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[Python-Dev] Re: [PEP 224] Attribute Docstrings

M.-A. Lemburg mal at lemburg.com
Wed Aug 30 04:35:00 EDT 2000 
Christian Tanzer wrote:
> 
> "M.-A. Lemburg" <mal at lemburg.com> wrote:
> 
> > > Triple quoted strings work -- that's what I'm constantly using. The
> > > downside is, that the docstrings either contain spurious white space
> > > or it messes up the layout of the code (if you start subsequent lines
> > > in the first column).
> >
> > Just a question of how smart you doc string extraction
> > tools are. Have a look at hack.py:
> 
> Come on. There are probably hundreds of hacks around to massage
> docstrings. I've written one myself. Ka-Ping Yee suggested
> inspect.py...

That's the point I wanted to make: there's no need to care much
about """-string formatting while writing them as long as you have
tools which do it for you at extraction time.
 
> My point was that in such cases it is much better if the language does
> it than if everybody does his own kludge. If a change of the Python
> parser concerning this point is out of the question, why not have a
> standard module providing this functionality (Ka-Ping Yee offered one
> <nudge>, <nudge>).

Would be a nice addition for Python's stdlib, yes. Maybe for 2.1,
since we are in feature freeze for 2.0...

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
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