[Python-Dev] Doctest and Footnotes (original) (raw)

Alexander Belopolsky alexander.belopolsky at gmail.com
Tue Jul 11 20:12:19 CEST 2006

On 7/11/06, Benji York <benji at zope.com> wrote: [snip]

I'm not quite sure what you're suggesting. A guess: put the code that isn't to be seen in the test dict with a string key being the name of the footnote?

That's right.

I don't think a ReST processor would like that much. It would see references to footnotes that are never defined. Or perhaps you're suggesting a non-ReST mechanism for the references?

I don't know how ReST processor is used. If you just filter the output of pydoc through a ReST processor, then you are right about undefined references. If, however, ReST processing is implemented inside pydoc, I don't see any problem in implementing test lookup.

Also, for many of the use-cases we have, we do want the code in the test, just not in such a prominent place, and not repeated more than once.

I my use-cases, testing code is clobbering the documentation, but there is no easy way to move it outside of the docstrings without breaking the order of evaluation. I don't use a ReST processor, by I can read ReST formatted text with little difficulty. I would greatly appreciate if I could clean the docstrings without loosing the tests.

BTW, another feature that I would greatly appreciate would be a unittest wrapper which makes each docstring in a separate test case. Also new and init method docstrings is the natural place to put set-up code.

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