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From: pa@see.signature.invalid (Pierre Asselin)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.python
Subject: staticmethod(cls)
Date: Thu, 4 Sep 2025 19:28:53 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: PANIX Public Access Internet and UNIX, NYC
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For reasons I won't go into I ended up defining classes inside of
a class body. That's not in the manual, but I see no reason it would
fail.

But then, I accidentally decorated the inner classes with
@staticmethod! It didn't break anything, but it had an interesting
side effect: help() and pydoc on the outer class shows the docs
of the inner class members. Normally only the inner classes are
listed, not their contents.

Here's a minimal example.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
class Outer:
    '''Outer class'''
    def outer_method(self):
        '''outer method'''

    class Inner0:
        '''Inner class'''
        def inner_0(instance):
            '''inner method, not seen by pydoc.'''

    @staticmethod
    class Inner1:
        '''Inner class passed through staticmethod()'''
        def inner_1(instance):
            '''inner method, visible to pydoc !'''
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Save and run pydoc, or import and run help(_module_.Outer).

Now that's *seriously* not-in-the-manual. I won't rely on that
behavior, plus the expanded documentation is a bit too much,
but I'm curious as how that interaction between staticmethod()
and help()/pydoc came about.

-- 
pa at panix dot com