title: What is the origin of __author__?
body: <p>Where does the convention of using private metadata variables like <code>__author__</code> within a module come from?</p>
  
  <p><a href="http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2001-March/013328.html">This</a> Python mailinglist thread seems to hint at some discussion about it in 2001, but by the sound of it the convention was already out in the wild.</p>
  
  <p>Other than that, I can only find <a href="http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0345/">this PEP on package metadata</a>, which seems influential but tangental at best.</p>
  
  <p>I'd like to try and find some explicit material on the subject so my documentation tool can parse these metadata variables successfully.</p>