[Doc-SIG] Re: docstring signatures

[Guido van Rossum]

> > > Note that it does not make it *absolutely* easy or painless or automatic;
> > > any of those are bogus arguments.  But having code and doccs in the same
> > > file definitely makes life *less* painful.
> > 
> > What argues against this for me is the existence of highly tuned
> > language-specific editing modes in Emacs and many other text editors;
> > these rarely do a good job on hybrids.
> 
> Absolutely true.  But python-mode already does a poor job of handling
> docstrings -- or in fact any interesting[1] triple-quoted string.  Personally,
> I wouldn't mind my docstrings being entirely one colour (say, the "string"
> colour) and my Python code being colourized properly -- but even without any
> formal markup in docstrings, Emacs can't handle that, so how can adding a
> markup syntax make things worse?

(IDLE does docstrings right, by the way.)

Emacs also has sophisticated Latex and XML modes, which are however
useless for Latex or XML embedded in docstrings.  That's why I prefer
to have the docs in a separate file -- so I can have a separate mode
to help me edit it.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)