Docstring

Documentation is supported at language level, in the form of docstrings. Markdown is Elixir's de facto markup language of choice for use in docstrings:

def module MyModule do
  @moduledoc """
  Documentation for my module. With **formatting**.
  """

  @doc "Hello"
  def world do
    "World"
  end
end

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. When they are kept, docstrings may be viewed and changed using the DOCUMENTATION function.[5] For instance:

 (defun foo () "hi there" nil)
 (documentation #'foo 'function) => "hi there"

The common practice of documenting a code object at the head of its definition is captured by the addition of docstring syntax in the Python language.

The docstring for a Python code object (a module, class, or function) is the first statement of that code object, immediately following the definition (the 'def' or 'class' statement). The statement must be a bare string literal, not any other kind of expression. The docstring for the code object is available on that code object's __doc__ attribute and through the help function.

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

"""The module's docstring"""

class MyClass:
    """The class's docstring"""

    def my_method(self):
        """The method's docstring"""

def my_function():
    """The function's docstring"""

Assuming that the above code was saved as mymodule.py, the following is an interactive session showing how the docstrings may be accessed:

>>> import mymodule
>>> help(mymodule)
The module's docstring
>>> help(mymodule.MyClass)
The class's docstring
>>> help(mymodule.MyClass.my_method)
The method's docstring
>>> help(mymodule.my_function)
The function's docstring
>>>