> I didn't see Travis's Numpy book mentioned at all in your writeup, so > I am wondering where its role in the doc effort is.
> Is it OK to copy material out of the book and into > other parts of the documentation? No worries, Travis is on board here. We included him and others on the Steering Committee in planning this effort. Travis's book overlaps the current effort to some extent. The function descriptions in the book are the numpy docstrings, such as they currently exist. The docstrings are open source software and the book is a work derived from them. The current effort is essentially to fill in the docstrings to the full expectation of professional reference documentation. If you compare the docstring example on the wiki (for multivariate_normal) with the current page for that function, you'll see the difference. The multivariate_normal docstring is actually pretty good among current docstrings, but even for this function we're aiming for a big change. Collected, the new docstrings will make a reference manual very much like those you'll find for other scientific languages, with similar format for the pages. The choice of a ReST-based docstring format some time ago was to support producing such a manual. The rest of Travis's book is still critical information and we're not contemplating replacing it at this point. Much of it is on the technical end, and our goal is to address the general user, particularly students learning to do data analysis, so I think even the eventual User Guide, whatever form it takes, will not encroach on its technical focus. Of course, he's welcome to include the improved docstrings in his book if he wants to (as is anyone), or to exclude them and make a tighter book aimed at extension programmers, or whatever. Let's continue discussion on scipy-dev, just to keep it all in one place. --jh-- _______________________________________________ Numpy-discussion mailing list Numpy-discussion@scipy.org http://projects.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
