Glossary of terms

argument

Terms or options that control or modify a function or script’s behavior.

docstring

Documentation for a Python function, method, class, module, or object. These must appear as triple-quoted strings immediately below the def line for functions and methods, and immediately below the class line for classes. module docstrings appear immediately at the top of the module.

executable scripts

Scripts that can be executed from a shell, as opposed to (or in addition to) inside the Python interpreter.

main-like function

A function that is called when a script is executed from a shell, as opposed to inside an interactive Python session. These are the functions from whose arguments sphinxcontrib.argdoc generates documentation.

These are typically named main, and in idiomatically written Python are called by the following lines, which appear as the final lines of executable scripts:

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

sphinxcontrib.argdoc detects main-like functions by scanning modules for functions whose names match the current value of the configuration parameter argdoc_main_func (set in conf.py, with default value ‘main’).

module docstring

Documentation for a Python module, which appears as a triple-quoted string starting on the first code line:

#!/usr/bin/env python
"""This is the module docstring. It can be very long
and span multiple lines, contain tables, et c
"""

import argparse
...

shell

An environment that executes commands. This could be a command-line environment like the bash prompt, or a graphical environment like the OSX Finder.