it seems __doc__ is useful to provide some documentation in, say, functions This is true. In addition to functions, documentation can also be provided in modules. So, if you have a file named mymodule.py like this: You can access its docstrings like this: Now, back to your question: what does print(__doc__) do? Simply put: it prints the module docstring. If no … Read more
It is nice for a Python module to have a docstring, explaining what the module does, what it provides, examples of how to use the classes. This is different from the comments that you often see at the beginning of a file giving the copyright and license information, which IMO should not go in the … Read more
Formats Python docstrings can be written following several formats as the other posts showed. However the default Sphinx docstring format was not mentioned and is based on reStructuredText (reST). You can get some information about the main formats in this blog post. Note that the reST is recommended by the PEP 287 There follows the main used formats … Read more
Python does not have such a mechanism. Prepend a # to each line to block comment. For more information see PEP 8. Most Python IDEs support a mechanism to do the block-commenting-with-pound-signs automatically for you. For example, in IDLE on my machine, it’s Alt+3 and Alt+4. Don’t use triple-quotes; as you discovered, this is for documentation strings not block comments, although it … Read more