[issue42414] unable to document fields of dataclass

[Eric V. Smith]

Eric V. Smith <eric at trueblade.com> added the comment:

How would you expect to extract this docstring?

I'm not sure how this would work in practice, since both of these are errors:

>>> class A:
...    def __init__(self):
...        self.x = 3
...        self.x.__doc__ = 'foo'
...
>>> A()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "<stdin>", line 4, in __init__
AttributeError: 'int' object attribute '__doc__' is read-only
>>> class B:
...    x: int = 0
...    x.__doc__ = 'foo'
...
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "<stdin>", line 3, in B
AttributeError: 'int' object attribute '__doc__' is read-only

It could be stored in the dataclass-specific data attached to a class, but then you'd have to use a dataclass-specific function to get access to it. I'm not sure that's a great improvement.

I also note that attrs doesn't have this feature, probably for the same reason.

----------
type:  -> enhancement
versions: +Python 3.10

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<https://bugs.python.org/issue42414>
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