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Not entirely on topic, but close enough: pydoc currently doesn't use the \_\_signature\_\_ information at all. Adding such support would be easy enough, see #17053 for an implementation ;-)

True, it doesn't use inspect.signature, it uses inspect.getfullargspec. Since I don't propose modifying inspect.getfullargspec to add the optional parameter group information, 17053 or something like it would have to happen.

Sorry to make your life more complicated, but unless I'm misunderstanding  
something, issue 18220 (http://bugs.python.org/issue18220) throws another  
monkey-wrench in to this. If I'm understanding this discussion correctly,  
that example:

 islice(stop)
 islice(start, stop [, step])
requires the multiple-signature approach.
Note also that the python3 documentation has moved away from the []
notation wherever possible.

It depends on what problem you're addressing. In terms of the
Argument Clinic DSL, and in terms of the static introspection
information stored for builtins, someone (Nick?) suggested a
refinement to the semantics: in the face of ambiguity, prefer the
leftmost group(s) first. That means that range() and islice()
could be specified as follows:

range([start,] stop, [step])

In terms of the documentation, it might be better to preserve the
multiple-lines approach, as perhaps that's more obvious to the
reader. On the other hand: in Python 3, help(itertools.islice)
uses solely the optional group syntax, on one line.





On 07/07/2013 07:25 AM, Ronald Oussoren wrote: