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April 2010

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epydoc reST markup for stdlib docstrings
by Barry Warsaw April 15, 2010

April 15, 2010

Hello Doc-Siggers, During some recent work on the PEP 3147, I had a need to add some documentation (docstrings) to some new functions. To document the function arguments I added epydoc reST style markup: def ensure_bytecode_path(bytecode_path): """Ensure that the __pycache__ directory for PEP 3147 pyc file exists. :param bytecode_path: File system path to PEP 3147 pyc file. """ Now, I didn't even think twice about this because several of the larger Python projects I work on have already adopted epydoc reST markup for API. During his review, Antoine disapproved of this, pointing to PEPs 257 and 287. My reading of these PEPs however, certainly doesn't prohibit the use of epydoc reST markup. Georg and I pointed to the lack of a clear, consistent convention in the Python stdlib. I would like to propose that epydoc reST markup be made that convention. http://epydoc.sourceforge.net/epydoc.html#epydoc-fields PEP 257 does include an example for keyword arguments, but not much more is said about them. epydoc reST markup is compliant with PEP 287 IMO, by adopting reST syntax. I think Sphinx does a pretty good job of handling such API markup too. A PEP might be necessary to make this a firm decision. What do you think about adopting epydoc reST markup for documenting the stdlib API? -Barry

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