On Mon, Oct 8, 2018 at 2:14 AM Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
That might work for Marko's use-case, but the problem is more general and I'd like to consider the broader picture. Currently instance __doc__ attributes are sometimes ignored by help(). Given these:
py> class X: ... pass ... py> a = X() py> b = X() py> a.__doc__ = "Hello" py> b.__doc__ = "Goodbye"
I would expect to see the per-instance docstrings, but in 3.6 at least, help(a) and help(b) both give the unhelpful:
Help on X in module __main__ object:
Each of them is actually giving help(X). So having that respect *any* per-instance information first means changing it so help(inst) is different from help(cls).
As per my earlier post, making the docstrings a property fails from help(). So I think there's some improvement here:
- fix help() so it picks up per-instance docstrings, not just the class docstring;
- including the case where the docstring is a property.
Which are really the same thing - having help() care about the actual instance, not the type. Currently, it works if you put a property on the metaclass:
class mX(type): ... @property ... def __doc__(self): ... return "Docstring" ... class X(metaclass=mX): pass ... help(X()) class X(builtins.object) | Docstring | ...
Maybe what we really need here is a convenient way to create class properties. class X: @classproperty def __doc__(cls): return "Docstring" I know this has been discussed before, though I can't find a discussion thread right now. ChrisA