[Python-Dev] Python's footprint

[Greg Ward]

On 08 November 2001, Gustavo Niemeyer said:
> It means that about 10% of python's executable is documentation.

Interesting!  I wonder what the corresponding figure for .pyc files in
the std library is.

> Now I'm
> wondering if something like a DOCSTRING("foo") macro would be valid in
> that case. If the user disabled it trough --disable-doc, for example,
> DOCSTRING() would return "".

I think it would have to be a bit fancier than that; wouldn't you also
have to specify the name of the C identifier into which that
documentation is put?  That's doable in an all-ANSI-C world, but
trickier than DOCSTRING("foo").

Anyways, that sounds like a useful idea.  It would probably be a big
patch that touches lots of files, so it's unlikely to get into Python
2.2.  You might consider whipping up a patch now to get it under
consideration early in 2.3's life-cycle.

        Greg
-- 
Greg Ward - Unix weenie                                 gward@python.net
http://starship.python.net/~gward/
All things are possible -- except skiing through a revolving door.