[Doc-SIG] On David Ascher's Rant

[David Ascher]

On Tue, 30 Nov 1999 uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com wrote:

> > It's not my favorite, but Uche mentioned that XML-ish syntax is much
> > easier to parse.  While I don't really grant that point (or rather I think
> > that the hill needs to be climbed once for all), I want to emphasize:
> 
> Huh?  Where? What? When? WHO?
> 
> I'm sure I _explicitly_ said that XML in doc-strings is a bad idea.

Indeed.  I was referring to the bit where you said:

> The reality, though, is that it's easier to go from XML or TeX to any
> of the many formats Python users want than it would be from
> Jim-Fulton-David-Ascher pythonic documentation format.  

I apologize if I misunderstood or misquoted you.

I believe that the docstring syntax being discussed would be mappable to
some form of XML, which I think is what we all agree is a good idea, so
that the docstrings can be used to build library docs.  Please jump in if
something is apparently agreed to which would make this hard!

--david