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

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On Thu, 4 Sep 2025 19:28:53 -0000 (UTC), Pierre Asselin wrote:

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.

Note that the help for Inner1 is listed in the section of the help for
Outer headed “Static methods defined here:”. So all that’s happening is that the help() function is looking for class members that have been put through staticmethod(), whatever their type is, and I think recursively putting them through their own help() calls.

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