[Numpy-discussion] coding style: citations

[Alan G Isaac]

The docstring standard at
http://projects.scipy.org/scipy/numpy/wiki/CodingStyleGuidelines#docstring-standard
suggests a citation reference format that is not compatible
with reStructuredText.  Quoting from
http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/ref/rst/restructuredtext.html#citations:

	Citations are identical to footnotes except that they use
         only non-numeric labels such as [note] or [GVR2001].

In other words, the standard currently promotes a conflation of
notes and citations.

Another reason for avoiding the style currently in the docstring
standard is that it renders impossible the generation of citations
using a citation database.  (See e.g. the bibtext-like facilities offered
by bibstuff's bib4txt (http://code.google.com/p/bibstuff/).

Alan Isaac