One could say a lot of things about the preceding example (in particular, that there are more lines of comments than code), but it would be difficult to say that the end result is aesthetically pleasing. In particular, compared to the output of a program using Javadoc, this documentation looks rather plain. In order to remedy this shortcoming, it was decided that a more sophisticated way of specifying and generating documentation was needed.
Jim Fulton of Zope invented StructuredText as a simple markup language. It is similar to WikiWikiWebMarkup but simpler. Problems with both the specification and the implementation led to David Goodger creating a revised version, called reStructuredText. His goals for the language were that it should be:
Readable
Unobtrusive
Unambiguous
Unsurprising
Intuitive
Easy
Scalable
Powerful
Language-neutral
Extensible
Output-format-neutral
This led to the publication of PEP 0287 (https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0287/).