[Python-Dev] Pydoc Improvements / Rewrite

[Ron Adam]

Larry Hastings wrote:

> Just asking--are you going in a PEP-287-ly way as you work?  If not, 
> would your work make PEP 287 easier to implement?

Pydoc does no reformatting or changes to doc strings.  They are displayed "as 
is" in plain text.  About the only formatting that is done is to wrap long lines 
a bit better, such as 100 character length lines on a 80 character (or less) 
console window. In those cases, it tries to maintain the indent and break lines 
on white space.

The html pages produced also makes html, rfc, and pep referfences into links.

One of the goals is to make it easer to use it as a base for generating other 
types of formats.  So it should also make it easier for someone (else) to 
implement a PEP-287 extended version for their own needs.


> For those of us without eidetic memories, PEP 287 is "use 
> reStructuredText for docstrings":
>     http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0287/

Thanks for the link. PEP 287 looks to be fairly general in that it expresses a 
general desire rather than a specification.

Ron