4.7.6 文档字符串 Documentation Strings

There are emerging conventions about the content and formatting of documentation strings.

The first line should always be a short, concise summary of the object's purpose. For brevity, it should not explicitly state the object's name or type, since these are available by other means (except if the name happens to be a verb describing a function's operation). This line should begin with a capital letter and end with a period.

第一行应该是关于对象用途的简介。简短起见，不用明确的陈述对象名或类型，因为它们可以从别的途径了解到（除非这个名字碰巧就是描述这个函数操作的动词）。这一行应该以大写字母开头，以句号结尾。

If there are more lines in the documentation string, the second line should be blank, visually separating the summary from the rest of the description. The following lines should be one or more paragraphs describing the object's calling conventions, its side effects, etc.

如果文档字符串有多行，第二行应该空出来，与接下来的详细描述明确分隔。接下来的文档应该有一或多段描述对象的调用约定、边界效应等。

The Python parser does not strip indentation from multi-line string literals in Python, so tools that process documentation have to strip indentation if desired. This is done using the following convention. The first non-blank line after the first line of the string determines the amount of indentation for the entire documentation string. (We can't use the first line since it is generally adjacent to the string's opening quotes so its indentation is not apparent in the string literal.) Whitespace ``equivalent'' to this indentation is then stripped from the start of all lines of the string. Lines that are indented less should not occur, but if they occur all their leading whitespace should be stripped. Equivalence of whitespace should be tested after expansion of tabs (to 8 spaces, normally).

Python的解释器不会从多行的文档字符串中去除缩进，所以必要的时候应当自己清除缩进。这符合通常的习惯。第一行之后的第一个非空行决定了整个文档的缩进格式。（我们不用第一行是因为它通常紧靠着起始的引号，缩进格式显示的不清楚。）留白“相当于”是字符串的起始缩进。每一行都不应该有缩进，如果有缩进的话，所有的留白都应该清除掉。留白的长度应当等于扩展制表符的宽度（通常是8个空格）。

>>> def my_function():
...     """Do nothing, but document it.
...
...     No, really, it doesn't do anything.
...     """
...     pass
...
>>> print my_function.__doc__
Do nothing, but document it.

    No, really, it doesn't do anything.