[Doc-SIG] docstring grammar

[Edward Welbourne]

> ... you are going for the Miller 7 +/- 2 rule ...
sounds familiar.  Anyone unfamiliar with this might benefit from the URL
Tibs just sent me in connection with your message:

        http://www.well.com/user/smalin/miller.html

> We are building a similar mechanism into 4Suite to support i18n messages,
<awed>ooo</awed>

> __locale__ = 'en:UK'
Sounds good.

> ... LC_ALL environment variable ... default for the __locale__.

No.  This is a user-specified value; many users may be using the same
source file, at many sites; the source file isn't changing as you change
user; __locale__ is telling pythonic tools which set of keywords is
being used in the source file's doc strings; this also isn't changing
from one user to another.

However, using LC_ALL (or equivalent) to configure which Language
section the pythonic tools extract to show to the user, now that'd be
cool.  And if the right Language is absent ... try talking to babelfish
(although I have to confess this is better for humour than sense).

>> <keyword meaning `language'>: <language in which that keyword means `language'>

> Umm.  Or much rather not.

Sorry, it may not have been clear that that suggestion was of form `of
course, if anyone is volunteering to do something absurdly hard, far be
it from me to miss out on an opportunity to laugh myself breathless'.
Even if fate allows that there really is a way to do this (such that no
two languages will get confused by one another's keywords), it's a
fairly safe bet that about half of the keywords meaning `language' would
be words in other languages, with respectably many of them
offensive/lewd/absurd/funny in at least several other languages.

I must confess, I am looking forward to the growth of document-transfer
via babelfish and its kin.  Laughter is said to be good for one ...

	Eddy.