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From: Terry Reedy <tjreedy@udel.edu>
Subject: Re: imperative mood in docstrings
Date: Sun, 09 Feb 2014 15:46:05 -0500
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On 2/9/2014 7:05 AM, bagrat lazaryan wrote:
> pep 257 -- docstring conventions, as well as a myriad of books and other resources, recommend documenting a function's or method's effect as a command ("do this", "return that"), not as a description ("does this", "returns that"). what's the logic behind this recommendation?

The imperative is directed at the Python interpreter. It says what a 
call instructs the interpreter to do.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy