[Python-Dev] doctest improvements

Tim Peters tim.one at comcast.net
Mon May 31 20:25:40 EDT 2004


[Edward Loper]
> About a month and a half ago, I filed several patches for doctest, and
> they haven't gotten any comments; so I was wondering if anyone could look
> at them.

Jim Fulton and I intend to do some doctest work for 2.4, so feel free to
assign them to me.  I can't make time for it immediately, though.

> The most interesting is #933238, which addresses the often-noted problem
> that doctest can't handle blank lines.  It adds a special blank-line
> marker (currently "-"), which must be *dedented* with respect to the
> doctest block.

Fair warning that any gimmick weakening doctest's WYSIWYG guarantee is going
to be a hard sell if I'm the reviewer.  The business about blank lines is a
documented limitation of the design.  Limitations can indeed create
problems, but removing them can create other problems.  Making a doctest
reader learn a special "doctest markup language" is A Problem in this case.
Offhand, I'd be happier with an almost-self-evident (say)

    <blank line>

marker than with a cryptic

    _

"you have no hope of guessing what this means unless you scour the docs"
marker.  Dedenting is a clever idea, BTW.





More information about the Python-Dev mailing list