Steven> Anyone know what emacs lisp does ? It has an 'apropos' and
Steven> a 'describe' so I assume there is a similar feature, if
Steven> not the same syntax.
Well, it is the same type of thing. Example:
(defun my-example-defun (arg)
"This explains this function .... bla, bla, bla
more bla bla bla bla ...."
(do-something-useful)
(...)
....
)
This works very well for Emacs but ...
What's bothering me is that python is more of a programming language.
Although it is certainly possible to use python in an interactive way
your better of with having the documentation separated from the
running executable. (Ok, one thing doesn't have to rule out the
other.) At least you should be able to turn the thing off so that you
won't blow up your python more than necessary.
It is a strength though if the documentation is given syntactic
support so that a tool could be used to extract the documentation from
the source. The extracted information could then be used in your
favorite editor (e.g. Emacs), document processing system or even
generate a python documentation module.
The last idea attracts me. If you want documentation for say the
module string you'll do something like this:
import doc-string
print doc-string.<class, method, etc ...>
Maybe this could be done at "module-compile-time". I guess what I'm
really saying is that I want the documentation stored in a separate
file so that you won't have to scan piles of text when you don't want
to have it.
%% Mats