convention for documenting function parameters in doc strings

[danielx]

Is there a convention for how to document function (or method)
parameters in doc strings? Recently, I've been doing alot of PHP
programming, and in PHPdoc, you'd do it like this:

/*
* @param type $foo Description.
*
* @return type Description.
*/
function bar($foo) {
...
}

Is there an equivalent convention I (c|sh)ould be using in my Python
docstrings? I saw that Python 3 has function annotations, which could
be used for this purpose, but function annotations have no particular
purpose within the language itself (which seems like a mistake to me),
and they don't exist in the Python 2.x series (at least not the older
versions).

 

[Jean-Michel Pichavant]

Is there a convention for how to document function (or method)
parameters in doc strings? Recently, I've been doing alot of PHP
programming, and in PHPdoc, you'd do it like this:

/*
* @param type $foo Description.
*
* @return type Description.
*/
function bar($foo) {
...
}

Is there an equivalent convention I (c|sh)ould be using in my Python
docstrings? I saw that Python 3 has function annotations, which could
be used for this purpose, but function annotations have no particular
purpose within the language itself (which seems like a mistake to me),
and they don't exist in the Python 2.x series (at least not the older
versions).

Different strategies here:

1/ most doc builders propose their own format. You can stick to it if
you don't want to use another builder (e.g. epydoc has a specific syntax
to document signatures)
2/ Use a 'standard' format, usually these formats are a bit more formal
but they gain in portability, most builders support these formats.
reStructuredText is one of them and supported by all python doc builders.

http://epydoc.sourceforge.net/manual-othermarkup.html

JM

 

[danielx]

Different strategies here:

1/ most doc builders propose their own format. You can stick to it if
you don't want to use another builder (e.g. epydoc has a specific syntax
to document signatures)
2/ Use a 'standard' format, usually these formats are a bit more formal
but they gain in portability, most builders support these formats.
reStructuredText is one of them and supported by all python doc builders.

http://epydoc.sourceforge.net/manual-othermarkup.html

JM

Thanks for the link, Jean-Michel. I was hoping to find out more about
how this is don in reStructuredText, since that seems to be what's
used to document Python at docs.python.org. There is a section in the
page that you linked to which describes how documenting function
parameters in reST works, which seems to be what I was looking for.