[Tutor] Python Documentation Clarification

[David Hutto]

On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 10:49 AM, Huy Ton That <huyslogic at gmail.com> wrote:
> This is going to sound silly, but I realized there are some areas within the
> documentation that do not make absolute sense to me.
> e.g.
> compile(source, filename, mode[, flags[, dont_inherit]])
> I see within this built in function, the first argument can be what they
> define as source, the second argument as the filename and the third as the
> mode.
> But what confuses me is sometimes I see a bracket, above as [, flags[,
> dont_inherit]]. Is this an optional argument like flags=dont_inherit?
> Just not grokking it correctly and I can't seem to track down where the
> documentation formatting is defined within the python.org documentation...
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From

http://docs.python.org/tutorial/datastructures.html

is this :
'(The square brackets around the i in the method signature denote that
the parameter is optional, not that you should type square brackets at
that position. You will see this notation frequently in the Python
Library Reference.)'