List to string? Docstrings?

[Darrell]

>
> 1) For converting a string into a list, I used:
>
>         chars = list(text)
>
>    For getting back the string from the list, I tried:
>
>         import operator
>         text = reduce(operator.concat, chars)
>
>    but still, I wonder if you would not have a better suggestion...
>
string.join(chars)

> 2) I still miss the purpose of __doc__ strings.  It's true that I can
write:
>
>         print module.__doc__
>         print function.__doc__
>
>    and sometimes get useful information from these.  But what would I be
>    loosing, for my own things, if I was using mere `#' comments instead?
>
They aren't accessable at runtime. People sometimes embed usefull
information into the doc strings. Tim Peters has a testing framework and
John Aycock embed parsing grammer.

http://www.python.org/ftp/python/contrib/All/
 doctest.py

http://www.csr.uvic.ca/~aycock/python/

Some doc tools also know to pick up these and avoid the # type of comments.
You don't want all your comments showing up in the doc.

--Darrell