Hello list, disclaimer: I don't have much hindsight about what I'm talking about in the following, so I apologize if it doesn't make much sense... My question is: is there some way (apart from copy-and-paste :D) to execute some of the code inside docstrings, in order e.g. to generate pylab plots? This may be a useful feature for the documentation of scipy: indeed, a plot may speak for itself better than long explanations about the output of scipy's algorithms. Some docstrings already include calls to plotting commands (one example: http://docs.scipy.org/scipy/docs/scipy.stats.distributions.poisson/), but of course, the plots are not created while viewing the help. Maybe it's a stupid idea, but I'm thinking about a %demo magic function in Ipython that would print the docstring of an object and execute the code of the docstring (preferably in a separate namespace) and, in particular, display pylab's windows. Does such a feature already exist somewhere? If not, do you see any interest in coding it? Matplotlib and Mayavi2 call special demo functions and it would be possible to do the same for scipy, but on the other side, using directly the docstrings for demos might be just as well... Regards, Emmanuelle