On Mon, Oct 08, 2018 at 01:45:01AM +1100, Chris Angelico wrote: > On Mon, Oct 8, 2018 at 1:41 AM Marko Ristin-Kaufmann > <marko.ris...@gmail.com> wrote: > > (If you wonder about the use case: I'd like to dynamically generate the > > docstrings when functions are decorated with contracts from icontract > > library. Condition functions need to be parsed and re-formatted, so this is > > something that should be done on-demand, when the user either wants to see > > the help() or when the sphinx documentation is automatically generated. The > > docs should not inflict computational overhead during the decoration since > > normal course of program operation does not need pretty-printed contracts.) > > > > Have you tried just generating the docstrings at decoration time and > applying them? By the sound of it, they won't change after that, and > the only reason to run it later is performance... but have you > actually measured a performance hit resulting from that?
That might work for Marko's use-case, but the problem is more general and I'd like to consider the broader picture. Currently instance __doc__ attributes are sometimes ignored by help(). Given these: py> class X: ... pass ... py> a = X() py> b = X() py> a.__doc__ = "Hello" py> b.__doc__ = "Goodbye" I would expect to see the per-instance docstrings, but in 3.6 at least, help(a) and help(b) both give the unhelpful: Help on X in module __main__ object: class X(builtins.object) | Data descriptors defined here: | | __dict__ | dictionary for instance variables (if defined) | | __weakref__ | list of weak references to the object (if defined) (END) As per my earlier post, making the docstrings a property fails from help(). So I think there's some improvement here: - fix help() so it picks up per-instance docstrings, not just the class docstring; - including the case where the docstring is a property. -- Steve _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
