[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
While cleaning up the documentation for the tempfile module I noticed that
the docstrings for the mk*temp functions in the module itself list their
signatures (incompletely) in the first line.  I don't know if that was
intentional, but it seems both redundant and error-prone to me.  The help()
function already displays the signatures of Python functions.  There's no
need to put them in docstrings and risk having them out-of-date.  For
example:

    >>> help(tempfile.mkdtemp)
    Help on function mkdtemp in module tempfile:

    mkdtemp(suffix='', prefix='tmp', dir=None)
        mkdtemp([suffix, [prefix, [dir]]])
        User-callable function to create and return a unique temporary
        directory.  The return value is the pathname of the directory.

Am I way off-base here?  Let me know, as I have a couple minor tweaks to
check in besides these.

It seems that any documentation or help tool worth its salt should fetch the parameters from the definition and so including them in the docstring should be redundant duplication.

Michael Foord

Thx,

Skip
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