Q re documentation Python style

Carl Banks pavlovevidence at gmail.com
Sun Jun 8 18:46:12 EDT 2008


On Jun 8, 5:17 pm, kj <so... at 987jk.com.invalid> wrote:
> I'm a Perlhead trying to learn the Way of Python.

Welcome to the light, my son.


> I guess this is a rambling way to ask: are docstrings *it* as far
> Python documentation goes?  Or is there a second, more flexible
> system?


You can define a decorator to inject the docstring; at least the
docstring will not come between the function line and the body.
Define the decorator like this:


def doc(docstring):
    def inject_doc(function):
        function.func_doc = docstring
        return function
    return inject_doc


And then you could do this:

@doc("This is the docstring.")
def some_function():
    do_whatever()


I think most tools that use docstrings actually execute the module,
which means by the time the tool sees it the docstring will have been
assigned, though I'm not sure they all do.


Carl Banks



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