software beyond these guidelinesthoughyou still must decide what to write although some companies have internal standardsthere is no broad standard about what should go into the text of docstring there have been various markup language and template proposals ( html or xml)but they don' seem to have caught on in the python world franklyconvincing python programmers to document their code using handcoded html is probably not going to happen in our lifetimes that may be too much to askbut this doesn' apply to documenting code in general documentation tends to have lower priority among some programmers than it should too oftenif you get any comments in file at allyou count yourself lucky (and even better if it' accurate and up to datei strongly encourage you to document your code liberally--it really is an important part of well-written programs when you dothoughthere is presently no standard on the structure of docstringsif you want to use themanything goes today just as for writing code itselfit' up to you to create documentation content and keep it up to datebut common sense is probably your best ally on this task too built-in docstrings as it turns outbuilt-in modules and objects in python use similar techniques to attach documentation above and beyond the attribute lists returned by dir for exampleto see an actual human-readable description of built-in moduleimport it and print its __doc__ stringimport sys print(sys __doc__this module provides access to some objects used or maintained by the interpreter and to functions that interact strongly with the interpreter dynamic objectsargv -command line argumentsargv[ is the script pathname if known path -module search pathpath[ is the script directoryelse 'modules -dictionary of loaded modules more text omitted functionsclassesand methods within built-in modules have attached descriptions in their __doc__ attributes as wellprint(sys getrefcount __doc__getrefcount(object-integer return the reference count of object the count returned is generally one higher than you might expectbecause it includes the (temporaryreference as an argument to getrefcount(you can also read about built-in functions via their docstrings the documentation interlude