documentation strings
docstrings

Here are some tips for the writing of documentation strings.

Documentation strings are like comments, except that they are easier to access.

Also worth noting are the documentation strings that can be associated with declarations and equations.

Don't write key sequences directly in documentation strings.

Actual access to the documentation strings becomes slower as a result, but this normally is not enough to bother users.

By default, it searches the documentation strings only for preloaded functions and variables.

Accessing documentation strings in the usual way substitutes current key binding information for these special sequences.

In documentation strings for a major mode, you will want to refer to the key bindings of that mode's local map, rather than global ones.

For an example of its use, see the long example in section Access to Documentation Strings.

In Lisp, docstrings are known as documentation strings.

Put at least one blank line before and after top-level expressions. - Include documentation strings in your code.

For variables and constants which have documentation strings, specify the domain after the documentation.

Dynamic access to documentation strings does have drawbacks:

It is a good idea to provide documentation strings for all the functions in your program, even those that are only called from within your program.

If do-all is non-nil, it scans the names and documentation strings of all functions and variables.

Documentation strings may contain several special substrings, which stand for key bindings to be looked up in the current keymaps when the documentation is displayed.

If you alter the compiled file (such as by compiling a new version), then further access to documentation strings in this file will give nonsense results.

They may also include documentation strings (docstrings), which the Lisp system may use to provide interactive documentation:

Functions and variables loaded from a byte-compiled file access their documentation strings dynamically from the file whenever needed.

Note that the documentation strings for XEmacs are not the same thing as the XEmacs manual.

Rather than using the property list of the symbol, a separate function documentation is provided so that implementations can optimize the storage of documentation strings.

For information on the uses of documentation strings, see section `Help' in The XEmacs Reference Manual.

Manuals have their own source files, written in the Texinfo language; documentation strings are specified in the definitions of the functions and variables they apply to.

In order to extract documentation strings from an add-on package, first run make-docfile on the package to produce the DOC file.

Epydoc is a documentation generator that processes its own lightweight markup language Epytext for Python documentation strings.

Documentation is supported at language level, in the form of docstrings.

Docstrings can be as large as the programmer wants and contain line breaks.

The following is an interactive session showing how the docstrings may be accessed:

That means that a running program can retrieve its own docstrings and manipulate that information.

In Lisp, docstrings are known as documentation strings.

The Common Lisp standard states that a particular implementation may choose to discard docstrings whenever they want, for whatever reason.

Python also supports docstrings, a special sort of comment usually enclosed in triple-quotes ().

Markdown is Elixir's defacto markup language of choice for use in docstrings:

The doctest standard module uses interactions copied from Python shell sessions into docstrings, to create tests.

There are tools available that can extract the docstrings to generate an API documentation from the code.

The syntax is uncomplicated enough for the programmer to read the raw Epytext docstrings embedded in the source code directly.

The following Python file shows the declaration of docstrings within a python source file:

Python docstrings appear as a string literal (not an expression) as the first statement following the definition of functions, methods, modules, and classes.

They may also include documentation strings (docstrings), which the Lisp system may use to provide interactive documentation:

However, the style guide for the language specifies that triple double quotes () are preferred for both single and multi-line docstrings.

In contrast with comments, docstrings are themselves Python objects and are part of the interpreted code that Python runs.

Languages that support docstrings include Python, Lisp, Elixir, Clojure, and Julia.

These literals strip leading indentation and the trailing newline (but not the leading newline), and are especially used for inline documentation, known as docstrings.

Docstrings can in turn be extracted from program files to generate documentation in other formats such as HTML or PDF.

When they are kept, docstrings may be viewed (and changed) using the DOCUMENTATION function.

Both the EpyText format of Epydoc and Docutils' reStructuredText format support the markup of doctest sections within docstrings.

As opposed to freeform Python docstrings, reStructuredText (both also supported) and other markup languages for docstrings, Epytext supports linking between different pieces of documentation.

The doctest module looks for such sequences of prompts in a docstring, re-executes the extracted command and checks the output against the output of the command given in the docstrings test example.

Unlike conventional source code comments, or even specifically formatted comments like Javadoc documentation, docstrings are not stripped from the source tree when it is parsed, but are retained throughout the runtime of the program.

Although doctest does not allow a Python program to be embedded in narrative text, it does allow for verifiable examples to be embedded in docstrings, where the docstrings can contain other text.