Doctest runs on .rst files, which are plain text files, finds and reports errors, and reports no errors when the errors are fixed. See #10875 where is was very helpful. So your last comment puzzles me.

In any case, your patch is too big to digest at once. I extracted the part for howto/sorting.rst and tried to apply to 3.2, but the file has changed too much (at least for TortoiseSVN). So I pasted the '... 's (and adjusted spacing) where needed, and did the two other changes you had. This left just two failures -- for the 2.7 code using 'cmp=xxx' args. With '# doctest: +SKIP' added twice, doctest passes. Patch commited for 3.2 as r87946.

> instances when human and computer reader's interests are in conflict.
What is one (or more) that you were thinking of?