Tried Ruby (or, "what Python *really* needs" or "perldoc!")

[Terry Hancock]

On 14 Mar 2006 09:25:07 -0800
john_sips_tea at yahoo.com wrote:
> Do you prefer epytext or reST?

I personally prefer epytext primarily because it has support
for greek letters and math symbols. That could be very
useful in documenting certain kinds of software. OTOH, I
haven't had much occasion to use that feature (once upon a
time almost all the software I wrote was scientific, but it
seems I've pretty much given it up -- not that I
particularly planned to, but it's turned out that way).

I was under the impression that pydoc already interpreted
restructured text notation, but maybe I was wrong. I don't
like pydoc because it doesn't make useable static
documentation sets -- that's where epydoc (which I suppose
stands for "extended pydoc") shines.

Although it's great to have "manpage" type help, I
personally find HTML documentation much easier to read and
browse.  Pydoc can do this if you are willing to use it as a
server, but it doesn't do so well at making an in-package
website, which is what I usually want to do.

There's also happydoc, which was better than either at
discovering documentation, but stagnated somewhere between
2.x and 3.x with bugs that make it fairly unusable.  What
would be cool is if some of happydoc's unique features were
ported to epydoc (such as getting information from comments
as well as docstrings).

-- 
Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com