On multiple occasions I have wanted to add documentation not only to Python classes and functions, but also instance variables. This seems to involve (at least) two orthogonal questions:

1) what is the proper syntax to associate documentation (docstrings ?) to objects ?
2) what changes need to be applied to Python's infrastructure (e.g., the help system) to support it ?


I have attempted to work around 1) in my custom code by explicitly setting an object's `__doc__` attribute. However, calling `help()` on such an object would simply ignore that attribute, and instead list the documentation associated with the instance type.

Am I missing something here, i.e. am I approaching the problem the wrong way, or am I the first to want to use object-specific documentation ?