Best way to do attribute docstrings?

[Ken Kuhlman]

Replying to myself in case someone finds this interesting.

Anyway, I took another shot at this with a little fresher mind, and it
was quickly obvious that I was trying to force attributes to behave
more like classes.  It was a small step from there to creating a
factory function to return instances of the appropriate class.  I'm
much happier with the result than either of the two previously posted
kludges.


# A factory function for generating attributes that can be annotated.
def attr(value, doc=None):
    base = type(value)
    if base == bool:
        # bool class can't be used as a base, so we make one that can.
        class MyBool(int):
            def __str__(self):
                return str(bool(self))
            __repr__ = __str__
        base = MyBool

    class FancyAttr(base):
        pass

    fa = FancyAttr(value)
    fa.__doc__ = doc
    return fa


class Animal(object):
    four_legs = attr(value = True, doc = "Animal has four legs")
    favorite_food = attr('cheese', doc = "Animal's favorite food")
    has_fur = attr(False)
    has_fur.__doc__ "Animal has fur"

print Animal.four_legs.__doc__, '::', Animal.four_legs
print Animal.favorite_food.__doc__, '::', Animal.favorite_food
print Animal.has_fur.__doc__, '::', Animal.has_fur