[Python-ideas] Syntax for dedented strings

[Steven D'Aprano]

Michael Foord wrote:

> How about *another* string prefix for dedented strings:
> 
> class Thing(object):
>     d"""
>     This text will be,
>     nicely dedented,
>     thank you very much.
>     """"

I think you need to explain the problem being solved, and your 
requirements, in a bit more detail here. As I understand it, the above 
is equivalent to this:


class Thing(object):
     """
This text will be,
nicely dedented,
thank you very much.
"""

except that it looks indented in the source file. Compare that to the 
usual practice:

class Thing(object):
     """
     This text will be,
     nicely dedented,
     thank you very much.
     """

and the only difference is a bunch of leading spaces.

If all you do with the docstrings is read them with help() in the 
interactive interpreter, why do you care about saving a few spaces? 
help() calls pydoc, which does its own reformatting of the docstring.

Unless you regularly inspect instance.__doc__ by hand (not via help), 
I'm not sure what you hope to accomplish here.



-- 
Steven