On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 9:56 AM, David Lam <david.k.l...@gmail.com> wrote: > Recently I helped out on issue16954 which involved filling in docstrings > for methods and classes in ElementTree.py > > While doing so, I tried to test my work in the interpreter like this... > > >>> from xml.etree.ElementTree import Element > >>> help(Element) > > ...but found that help() showed nothing but empty strings! > > After some debugging, I found that the culprit was the > `from _elementtree import *` near the bottom of the module. > > Not wanting to copy & paste docstrings around, I thought one solution > might be to just reassign Element.__doc__ with the right docstring. > But, it seems that you can't do that for C extensions: > > >>> from _elementtree import Element as cElement > >>> cElement.__doc__ = 'correct docstring' > Traceback (most recent call last): > File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> > TypeError: can't set attributes of built-in/extension type > 'xml.etree.ElementTree.Element' > > --- > > Q. Is there way to maintain the same docstring without > resorting to copying and pasting it in two places? > > I tried to find an example in the source which addressed this, but > found that the docstrings in similar cases to be largely duplicated. > For instance, _datetimemodule.c, decimal_.c and _json.c all seem to > exhibit this docstring copy and pastage. >
Hi NumPy uses a hack to deal with this problem. It has a small C function that would mutate the docstring under your feet. Personally I would prefer some sort of tagging in C source that can copy-paste stuff instead, honestly. It does sound like a good idea to share docstrings. Seems also relatively trivial to write a test that checks that they stay the same. Cheers, fijal _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
