On a more general note, while I don't necessarily mind the parsing of the docstring to provide the usage, [PEP257](http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0257/#multi-line-docstrings) calls for the first line of a docstrng to be a description of what the function does. I tend to agree. (Moreover, it specifies a different [way to handle whitespace](http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0257/#handling-docstring-indentation) than you do, which is problematic.) You may want to define the usage as a string at the top of each function; that would likely be simpler.