[Python-Dev] Checked in...

[Ka-Ping Yee]

On Sun, 16 Jul 2000, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> > in paul's defence, note that tim, greg stein, and moshe
> > all told paul to go ahead and check it in...
> 
> Sigh.  Sorry Paul.  Now I'm annoyed at Tim, Greg & Moshe.

Uh, i'm afraid you'll have to add me to the list.  I wanted
to encourage Paul to proceed at full speed (even though i
didn't get around to it before seeing the messages from the
others).  I've felt similarly: anything that works reasonably
is better than nothing, even if it's not perfect.

That said, i have been doing some stuff in this area -- check
out http://www.lfw.org/python/ for inspect.py and htmldoc.py.
The former in particular is useful for extracting docstrings
and argument specs in a nice way.

My plan was to complete htmldoc.py and try to get in into the
distribution so that anyone could browse documentation on the
standard library.  It would include an option to start a little
webserver with a one-line command so that doc pages could be
automatically generated on your own modules as you work on them.

The next step in the plan was to provide text output so you
could ask about modules from the shell prompt (like a "man"
command specific to Python) and a function call you could use
from inside the interpreter to get quick help as well.



-- ?!ng