docstrings, invention there of

[Tim Peters]

[Laura Creighton]
> We think we were the first people to ever a) put the doc in the code
> b) make the interpreter extract them.  We haven't been able to find
> anybody earlier than us, at any rate.  If somebody is out there, I
> hope he is reading this newsgroup so we can find out.  You _know_ when
> you are not first, the rest of the time you just wonder.

Guido wouldn't claim that docstrings were original with Python.  I'm not
sure who "we" refers to here, or to what "the interpreter"; Python's
docstrings were most directly inspired by the similar facility in Emacs's
elisp interpreter (and it wasn't original there either, of course -- the
idea of attaching doc properties to Lisp atoms and extracting them via
introspection must go back several decades).