Control of __doc__ strings

[Terry Hancock]

Following a previous thread on this list about
automatic documenters, I've tried a couple, 
and there seems to be a strong preference for
documentation strings over comments (they seem
to be easier to associate with the object they
describe, which makes sense to me).

Anyway, not being a "native python speaker" 
I used comments in most of my code.  So I changed
my comment blocks to doc strings and put them
in the right places to get captured by the
documenter ("Crystal" in this case).  But I'm
concerned about the performance penalties of
doing this.  A typical source module of mine
contains anywhere from 3 to 5 times as much text
in comment blocks as in the code, so if it's
all loaded at run time, my code is going to bloat
up several fold just because of the documentation.

(Comments are stripped out during byte-compilation,
whereas doc strings are kept at run time).

Does python have a way to shut off a piece of
code during byte-compiling (the way that a
#ifdef ... #endif block works in C)?  Then I
could just turn the doc strings off for deliverable
code and leave them in during development, which
would be kind of useful, and the documenters would
work right.

I thought of:

if <condition> :
    """
    Documentation block.  
    """

but this runs at run-time, therefore the string is
still included in the byte-compiled code (right?).

-- 
Terry Hancock
hancock at earthlink.net