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Mistakes in examples in documentation #57
Description
I noticed a minor mistake in the documentation for _convertToTransferFunction. In particular, in the example
sys = _convertToTransferFunction([[1. 0.], [2. 3.]])
the numbers should be separated by commas. That made me wonder if there were mistakes in other examples, so I ran all of the examples as doctests with nosetests --with-doctest. That reveals 38 failed tests, and 1 error. Many of these problems are because some quantities are not defined in the examples. For instance:
T, yout = initial_response(sys, T, X0)
gives NameError: name 'sys' is not defined. I think it would be good to make these examples all self-contained and "runnable", so that 1) they are complete (e.g., users know exactly how to define an object like sys in the example above); and 2) they can be automatically tested as doctests. Any comments or objections?
Activity
murrayrm commentedon Apr 9, 2015
My only concern would be that some examples might require a lot of setup that would make it verbose and less useful. Setting up something like an LQR problem, for example. But if we can do these succinctly, then I agree that we should have the goal that examples execute (so
nosetests --with-doctestreturns no errors).cwrowley commentedon Apr 9, 2015
I agree about the potentially verbose setup. LQR is a good example too, because the calling syntax is complex, and not immediately obvious from the function's signature
lqr(*args, **kwargs). However, in the LQR documentation, I think the "Examples" section could actually be removed, since the syntax is already illustrated earlier in the doc string. Maybe formatting something like this could work for other routines where the setup is complicated too.DOC: fix small errors in docstring examples (python-control#57)
murrayrm commentedon Dec 23, 2018
Fixed in PR #228.