[Python-Dev] readonly __doc__

[Guido van Rossum]

On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 1:49 PM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
> Brett Cannon <brett <at> python.org> writes:
>> I honestly don't follow that sentence. But __doc__ is special because of its
>> use; documenting how to use of an object. In this case when you call
>> something like help() on an instance of an object it skips the instance's
>> value for __doc__ and goes straight to the defining class and stops there as
>> you don't care how a subclass says to use itself as that is not what you are
>> working with.
>
> I don't really understand how this explains the read-only __doc__.
> I am talking about modifying __doc__ on a class, not on an instance.
> (sure, a new-style class is also an instance of type, but still...)

Antoine, it's not clear from the questions you're asking whether
you've read the code in typobject.c that implements __doc__ or not.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)