[Python-Dev] question about docstring formatting (original) (raw)

glyph at divmod.com glyph at divmod.com
Thu May 28 15:45:30 CEST 2009

On 01:06 pm, jeremy at alum.mit.edu wrote:

It says that the summary line may be used by automatic indexing tools, but is there any evidence that such a tool actually exists? Or was there once upon a time? If there are no such tools, do we still think that it is important that it fits on line line?

For what it's worth, https://launchpad.net/pydoctor appears to do this, as you can see from the numerous truncated sentences on <http://twistedmatrix.com/documents/8.2.0/api/moduleIndex.html>.

I suspect a more reasonable approach for automatic documentation generators would be to try to identify the first complete sentence, rather than the first line... but, this is at least an accurate description of the status quo for some tools :).

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