On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 12:56 AM, David Lam <david.k.lam1@gmail.com> wrote:

I tried to find an example in the source which addressed this, but
found that the docstrings in similar cases to be largely duplicated.

I find this annoying too. It would be nice to have a common way to share docstrings between C and Python implementations of the same interface. One roadblock though is functions in C modules often document their parameters in their docstring.

>>> import _json

>>> help(_json.scanstring)

scanstring(...)

scanstring(basestring, end, encoding, strict=True) -> (str, end)

Scan the string s for a JSON string. End is the index of the

character in s after the quote that started the JSON string.

[...]

Argument clinic will hopefully lift this roadblock soon. Perhaps, we could add something to the clinic DSL a way to fetch the docstring directly from the Python implementation. And as an extra, it would be easy to add verification step as well that checks the both implementations provide a similar interfaces once we have this in place.