Dreaming of new generation IDE

alex23 wuwei23 at gmail.com
Wed Feb 3 20:03:47 EST 2010


Adam Tauno Williams <awill... at opengroupware.us> wrote:
> This is obvious even in the Python documentation itself where one
> frequently asks oneself "Uhh... so what is parameter X supposed to be...
> a string... a list... ?"

Could you provide an actual example to support this?

The only places I tend to see 'x' as a parameter in the Python library
docs are where it's clearly a number, or the text immediately beneath
it explains exactly what it is.

    random.seed([x])
        Initialize the basic random number generator. Optional
        argument x can be any hashable object.

Everywhere else, the docs seem to declare what the parameters should
be _and_ explains them in the text:

    itertools.combinations(iterable, r)
        Return r length subsequences of elements from
        the input iterable.

If you're finding places in the docs where this isn't the case, I'd
treat them as a documentation bug and report them. If it's not obvious
to you what an iterable is, well, I'm sure you've got a disparaging
term for those of us who do...



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