I originally became interested in automatic API documentation extraction tools for Python in March 2002. At the time, there were several such tools available, including pydoc and HappyDoc. However, none were widely used. I joined the doc-sig mailing list, and started working with its members on creating standards for API documentation tools in Python.
I created epydoc as a tool for exploring the issues involved in writing an automatic API documentation extraction tool. I also decided to use epydoc to document the Natural Language Toolkit, so that I would have a fairly large project with which to test out my system. The markup language and the output of epydoc have changed many times, and epydoc itself has undergone at least 3 complete rewrites. But eventually epydoc matured into a more stable system.
Over the past year, I haven't had much time to participate in the discussion of API documentation tool standards on the doc-sig mailing list. However, I've been adding features to epydoc as I need them for the Natural Language Toolkit. If there are any features that you're interested in seeing added to epydoc, please let me know.
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