pydoc vs. non-def'd methods

[Dan Sommers]

Greetings,

I'm hava a class in which there are two equally useful names for one
method.  Consider this design (there are other approaches, but that's
not what my question is about):

class Spam1:

    def eggs(self):
        '''Return the Meaning of Life.'''
        return 42

    ham = eggs

help(Spam1) shows that ham = eggs(self), which isn't all bad, but it
could be better.  help(Spam1.ham) shows the help for eggs; I know why,
but this could be better as well.  And in any case, eggs looks somehow
better than ham, because eggs has its own def statement and ham doesn't.

Now consider this design, designed to overcome the previous issues:

class Spam2:

    def _private(self):
        '''Return the Meaning of Life.'''
        return 42

    ham = _private
    eggs = _private

Now help(Spam2.ham) and help(Spam2.eggs) show the same thing, but
help(Spam2) hides _private and its docstring and shows that ham and eggs
both call _private.  That's no good.  I can expose _private (e.g., by
renaming it to public), but that defeats the purpose of making it
private in the first place.  I can go ahead and define ham to invoke
eggs, but then I have to duplicate the docstring, and it's not
being-hit-on-the-head obvious that ham and eggs are simply synonyms for
the same functionality.

I could put the documentation at the class level, but then it doesn't
show up as part of help(Spam2.eggs) or help(Spam1.ham).

So is there a clean way to define SpamN such that help(SpamN),
help(SpamN.ham), and help(SpamN.eggs) all do the Right Thing, and the
symmetry of ham and eggs is perfectly obvious to the most casual
observer?

Thanks,
Dan