Re: docstrings in the reference manual

[Panicz Maciej Godek]

2014-12-16 12:42 GMT+01:00 John Darrington <address@hidden>:

Why murder the English language more than necessary?  "Docstrings" is a cliche
which has come from other projects.  Peope for whom English is not their first
language can be confused by such aliterations.  They won't find the word in any
dictionary.

Actually, there's a wikipedia entry regarding that notion:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docstring

It appears that the word 'docstring' is already used in the technical jargon and Jamil's case proves that the manual could do better in faciliating the search.

Write the term "documentation string" out in full, or simply "documentation"
where the context is clear.

If you take a look at the index of the manual, you'll find entries like:

"alist", "async", "errno", "smob", "vcell" and so on. I don't think that adding a "docstring" entry would do any harm in this particular context (on the other hand, the "documentation string" entry is lacking as well, so I agree that it is more important to add this one in the first place)