[Python-Dev] req: Software Carpentry / coding standards

[Tim Peters]

[Greg Wilson]
> Hi, everyone.  We're a month away from final submissions in the
> Software Carpentry design competition, which means we're two months
> away from announcing winners and starting implementation effort,

Yay!  This is a wonderful competition, and if nobody yet has bothered to
thank you for spearheading it, let me know & I'll find someone who will
<wink>.

> and we're wondering whether there are generally-accepted coding
> standards, naming conventions, or other guidelines that we should
> adopt.  If so, URLs would be welcome...

When you can't fight about where to put curly braces, there's not much left
to argue.  The only serious attempt at a Python style guide I've seen is
Guido's:

    http://www.python.org/doc/essays/styleguide.html

Two from there large numbers of people will still argue about, but to no
avail:

+ No hard tabs.  Indents are 4 spaces, period.

+ Keep lines strictly less than 80 characters wide (I happen to keep them
under 77, to allow for one level of "> " mail quoting).

These rules ensure that code is readable as intended across all platforms.

> Also, it appears that there are two implementations of the xUnit
> testing framework in Python:
>
> Steve Purcell: http://sourceforge.net/project/?group_id=3912
> Cayte Lindner: ftp://bio.perl.org/pub/katel/biopython/UnitTests/PyUnit.zip
>
> We'd be grateful for comments on either.

Sorry, unfamiliar with these.