[Python-Dev] Would like to add Edward Loper as a Python developer

[Tim Peters]

Edward Loper runs the Natural Language Toolkit project on SF:

    http://nltk.sourceforge.net/

and the Epydoc project:

    http://epydoc.sourceforge.net/

More importantly <wink>, he's a heavy doctest user and has lots of ideas for
improving it.  doctest's implementation has grown unwieldy, and is in need
of refactoring.  Jim (Fulton), Edward and I intend to do a lot there over
the coming two weeks, and giving Edward commit privileges would simplify and
speed the process.

This is intended to be limited to doctest changes.  Are there objections?

If anyone else is interested in contributing to doctest surgery, let me
know.  A Wiki area might be a decent way to coordinate.  Ideas already on
the table include restructuring for plugability (e.g., there's no sane way
for you to take over doctest error reporting now, but restructuring to do
much more via (overridable) class methods is a sane alternative); new
gimmicks like notation for "there's a blank line here in this expected
output"; a sane way to get into the debugger upon a doctest failure (right
now, if you try, doctest is still swallowing stdout, so you can't see what
you're doing! Jeremy did some quick hacks around that for Zope3 already);
better support for writing "whole file" doctests (tutorial narratives
liberally illustrated with Python examples -- Zope3 is finding these very
helpful); and documenting all the additions that snuck into Python 2.3.