List to string? Docstrings?

[Robert Kern]

On 13 Sep 1999 17:37:53 -0400, =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Fran=E7ois_Pinard?=
<pinard at iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:

>Hello, people.  Still learning Python.  I wrote around 6000 Python lines
>in the last 10 days! :-)  I have two quick questions for you.
>
>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...

import string
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?

There are a couple tools that will scan your module and generate
documentation from the docstrings.  IDLE and a couple other GUI tools
(e.g. PTUI) allow you to browse through a tree representation of your
module and show the docstrings.  They are also quite useful in
interactive mode when you don't have have the source conveniently in
front of you.

>-- 
>François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard

Robert Kern           |
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