Tuple arg for "classinfo" in isinstance: what does it mean?

[Duncan Booth]

"Parzival Herzog" <parz at shaw.SpamBucket.ca> wrote in 
news:UKwJ9.197687$ka.4658283 at news1.calgary.shaw.ca:
> "Duncan Booth" <duncan at NOSPAMrcp.co.uk> wrote in message
>> Did you try looking at the docstring?

(I reformatted this to remove your top posting. Please don't top post, it 
makes the threads really hard to follow).

> I'm an old fart, but I can learn new tricks. I think I would still prefer
> to have a complete definition in the ref manual, as I do RTFM all the
> time when programming in python, but this will do in cases of
> ambiguity.

The problem is that the documentation in places is incomplete or out of 
date. This is true of most software, not just open source projects, however 
at least in this case you have an opportunity to do something about it.

When something like this strikes you as badly explained, and you have taken 
the time to figure out what it should say, please do contribute a patch to 
the documentation. The problem here is that the original author of the 
documentation probably also wrote the code, so to them it was obvious what 
they meant to say.
> 
> On the other hand, the idea of using experimentation to substitute
> for documentation, as Erik Max Francis has suggested, has my
> jaw dropping in amazement.
> 
Maybe, but that is what I regularly do whether I'm programming Python or 
writing C++ to a Microsoft API. At least in Python you have an interactive 
mode that makes it a bit easier.


-- 
Duncan Booth                                             duncan at rcp.co.uk
int month(char *p){return(124864/((p[0]+p[1]-p[2]&0x1f)+1)%12)["\5\x8\3"
"\6\7\xb\1\x9\xa\2\0\4"];} // Who said my code was obscure?