User:Lsloan/ReStructuredText

reStructuredText is a file format for textual data used primarily in the Python programming language community for technical documentation.

It is part of the Docutils project of the Python Doc-SIG (Documentation Special Interest Group), aimed at creating a set of tools for Python similar to Javadoc for Java or POD for Perl. Docutils can extract comments and information from Python programs, and format them into various forms of program documentation.

In this sense, reStructuredText is a lightweight markup language designed to be both (a) processable by documentation-processing software such as Docutils, and (b) easily readable by human programmers who are reading and writing Python source code.

reStructuredText is sometimes abbreviated as RST, ReST, or reST. This can create confusion with Representational State Transfer (REST), an unrelated technology.

History
Setext (developed by Ian Feldman or Tony Sanders) and StructuredText (developed by Zope) were ancestral forms of lightweight markup language.

There were a number of problems with StructuredText, and reST was developed to address them. The name reStructuredText was chosen to indicate that reST is a "revised, reworked, and reinterpreted StructuredText."

reST began to see significant use in the Python community in 2002.

Reference implementation
The reference implementation of the reST parser is a component of the Docutils text processing framework in the Python programming language, but other parsers are available.

Applications
reStructuredText is commonly used for technical documentation, for example, in documentation of Python libraries. However, it is suitable for a wide range of texts.

Since 2008, reST is a core component of Python's Sphinx document generation system.

Trac also supports reStructuredText, as does GitHub and Bitbucket.

Distributed Proofreaders, which prepares texts for Project Gutenberg, is considering adoption of reST as a basic format from which other ebook formats could be generated.

The software build tool CMake switched from a custom markup language to reStructuredText in version 3.0 for its documentation.

Anonymous links
N.B.: named links and anonymous links are enclosed in grave accents (`), and not in apostrophes (').