[Python-Dev] The docs, reloaded (original) (raw)

Martin Blais blais at furius.ca
Wed May 23 02:30:17 CEST 2007

On 5/22/07, Martin Blais <blais at furius.ca> wrote:

ReST works well only when there is little markup. Writing code documentation generally requires a lot of markup, you want to make variables, classes, functions, parameters, constants, etc.. (A better avenue IMHO would be to augment docutils with some code to automatically figure out the syntax of functions, parameters, classes, etc., i.e., less markup, and if we do this in Python we may be able to use introspection. This is a challenge, however, I don't know if it can be done at all.)

Just to follow-up on that idea: I don't think it would be very difficult to write a very small modification to docutils that interprets the default role with more "smarts", for example, you can all guess what the types of these are about:

class Foo (this is a class Foo) bar(a, b, c) -> str (this is a function "bar" which returns a string) name (attribute) (this is an attribute)

...so why couldn't the computer solve that problem for you? I'm sure we could make it happen. Essentially, what is missing from ReST is "less markup for documenting programs". By restricting the problem-set to Python programs, we can go a long way towards making much of this automatic, even without resorting to introspecting the source code that is being documented.

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