On Tue, Jan 21, 2020 at 12:55 PM <cont...@ehsankia.com> wrote:
> Currently, there is no way to add docstrings to fields in dataclasses.
> PEP257 talks about attribute docstrings (a string literal following an
> assignment), but these are visual only and not accessible at runtime. My
> suggestion would be a simple `doc` or `docstring` parameter to
> dataclasses.field(). Currently the best way to get anything close to this
> is using metadata, which is much clunkier:
> `dataclasses.field(metadata={'docstring': 'my description'})`
>
My first thought is "sure, why not", but then I thought a bit more, and I"m
not so sure.
docstrings are VERY useful for class methods. but dataclass fields are not
methods, they are attributes, and usually simple attributes. Which I do'nt
hink there is any way to attach docstrings to in regular old classes. You
can crate a property that looks like an attribute, an give it a docstring,
but if you're going that far, maybe dataclasses aren't the right tool for
the job.
In fact, I'm not sure it's even possible: if a filed is a simple type, say
and in integer, how would you give it a a docstring??
In [17]: i.__doc__ = "an integer's docstring"
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
AttributeError Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-17-94dacc7686e2> in <module>
----> 1 i.__doc__ = "an integer's docstring"
AttributeError: 'int' object attribute '__doc__' is read-only
-CHB
--
Christopher Barker, PhD
Python Language Consulting
- Teaching
- Scientific Software Development
- Desktop GUI and Web Development
- wxPython, numpy, scipy, Cython
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