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Ron Adam wrote:<br>
<blockquote type="cite">Thanks for the link. PEP 287 looks to be fairly
general in
that it expresses a general desire rather than a specification.</blockquote>
I thought it was pretty specific. I'd summarize PEP 287 by quoting
entry #1 from its "goals of this PEP" section:<br>
<ul>
<li>To establish reStructuredText as a standard structured plaintext
format for docstrings (inline documentation of Python modules and
packages), PEPs, README-type files and other standalone documents.</li>
</ul>
<br>
Talin wrote:<br>
<blockquote type="cite">Rather than fixing on a standard markup, I
would like to see support
for a __markup__ module variable which specifies the specific markup
language that is used in that module. Doc processors could inspect that
variable and then load the appropriate markup translator.</blockquote>
I guess I'll go for the whole-hog +1.0 here. I was going to say +0.8,
citing "There should be one—and preferably only one—obvious way to do
it.". But I can see organizations desiring something besides ReST,
like if they already had already invested in their own internal
standardized markup language and wanted to use that.<br>
<br>
This makes the future clear; the default __markup__ in 2.6 would be
"plain", so that all the existing docstrings work unmodified. At which
point PEP 287 becomes "write a ReST driver for the new pydoc".
Continuing my dreaming here, Python 3000 flips the switch so that the
default __markup__ is "ReST", and the docstrings that ship with Python
are touched up to match—or set explicitly to "plain" if some strange
necessity required it.<br>
<br>
(And when do you unveil DocLobster?)<br>
<br>
Cheers,<br>
<br>
<br>
<i>larry</i><br>
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