It occurs to me that there are many
situations where files are human authored and can include
comments but by default when python reads/modifies/writes
those files by default the comments are lost.
Some examples include configfile, json and
even python itself with the special case that docstrings are
read without being discarded.
If we wish to generate a commented file,
(such as an initial version of a config file), then file type
specific code is needed but in general if we read in a file
the comments are discarded – usually of course this is what we
need but not if we are going to be modifying values are
re-writing.
In the case of files that are read and
parsed into python objects we could quite easily have an
option to make comments a docstring on the resulting objects
and a write option to output the docstrings (marked as
comments).
It would be necessary to have a mechanism
for preserving file level comments that are interleaved with
values/objects and after the last value/object.
Of course, in many cases, it would be nice
to have find commented object and uncomment object, possibly
comment out object methods but I still believe that even
without such methods could be useful to be able to round trip
files that include comments.
Writing this has also sparked a thought of
wouldn’t it be nice to have a format for python line comments
where the object so commented gets a docstring from the line
comment, e.g.
class StockItem:
“”” Represents an item available in
store “””
lineno: str #! Catalogue Item Number in
the format AA-nnnn-AAA
:
The humble docstring can be so useful and
as far as I know any python object can carry one but currently
base classes such as int, etc. Have read only __doc__ members.
Of course I am probably going to get told
off for 2 related but divergent elements in one thread!
Steve Barnes