I've never participated in the doc-sig, and I haven't given a lot of thought to writing complete documentation in docstrings. Given my limited interest, I have always been puzzled by why Python has taken so long to come up with some simple conventions for structuring docstrings. The only other example I was familiar with was JavaDoc. I've never written an JavaDoc, but I've browsed lots of HTML generated by JavaDoc. The one time I looked at JavaDoc, it struck me as quite simple; I felt confident that I could write it given my limited knowledge of and interest in HTML. It also appeared that JavaDoc had a limited feature set, which also seemed like a strength: Let's not write fancy, formatted reports in docstrings. I don't have the same confidence in reStructuredText. It looks like I can mostly read it, but it seems hard to learn how to write. It seems burdensome to require module authors to learn Python and reStructuredText just to contribute to the std library. Jeremy