docpicture

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Mon, 13 Oct 2008 08:34:03 -0700, bearophileHUGS wrote:

> So in this situation I have sometimes created a quite small image (1
> bit/pixel) that encoded in png image format may require just few hundred
> bytes. With Python I encode is binary data string in base64, and I paste
> that as a string into the Python souce code. It probably takes only 4-7
> lines or so.
[...]
> Have you ever done this? Do you think such "documentation picture"
> (analogous to a docstring) is an acceptable practice? 

I've never done it, but I've often wished to be able to store diagrams in 
my code.


> I don't need to do
> that often enough, so I think it doesn't deserve to become supported by
> Python itself. 

I can't imagine Python having direct syntactic support for it, but I 
don't see any reason why the standard library couldn't some day grow a 
"docpicture" module, complete with a tiny (?) Tkinter app to display the 
diagram when requested.

I think this would be useful. If you choose to share your code under an 
appropriate licence, I would like to experiment with it.


-- 
Steven