There is a module in Sage, sage.sandpiles.sandpile [1] where all the classes defined therein define a .help() method that prints an actually pretty nice looking summary of the class's methods. The implementation of that method has some issues and is repeated almost verbatim for each class (which I fixed here [2]) but that's beside the point.
Most other classes in Sage do *not* have any such .help() method. The only other examples I could find were a couple classes in sage.lfunctions, and most of the sage.interfaces classes. Why this was added for sandpiles I have no idea--maybe it was originally a separate package from Sage. But it got me thinking: Maybe it would actually be nice if most Sage classes--or at least those inheriting from SageObject, had some version of this .help() method. Although we already do a decent job advertising the ? and ?? syntax, having .help() method is inherently more discoverable (an the help methods in sandpiles even advertise the ? syntax for further details). In principle, if classes had this, one might also want it for functions, but that's a little bit more problematic. I like the idea of moving this .help() method to SageObject though. What do you all think? Thanks, E [1] https://git.sagemath.org/sage.git/tree/src/sage/sandpiles/sandpile.py [2] https://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/26016 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
