[Python-Dev] Why is documentation not inline?

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Sun, 19 May 2013 15:29:37 -0700
Demian Brecht <demianbrecht at gmail.com> wrote:
> This is more out of curiosity than to spark change (although I
> wouldn't argue against it): Does anyone know why it was decided to
> document external to source files rather than inline?
> 
> When rapidly digging through source, it would be much more helpful to
> see parameter docs than to either have to find source lines (that can
> easily be missed) to figure out the intention. Case in point, I've
> been digging through cookiejar.py and request.py to figure out their
> interactions. When reading through build_opener, it took me a few
> minutes to figure out that each element of *handlers can be either an
> instance /or/ a class definition (I was looking at how to define a
> custom cookiejar for an HTTPCookieProcessor). Yes, I'm (now) aware
> that there's some documentation at the top of request.py, but it would
> have been helpful to have it right in the definition of build_opener.
> 
> It seems like external docs is standard throughout the stdlib. Is
> there an actual reason for this?

Have you seen the length of the documentation pages? Putting them
inline in the stdlib module would make the code much harder to skim
through.

Regards

Antoine.