[Python-Dev] PEP 8 updates/clarifications

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 02:59 PM 12/12/2005 -0800, Alex Martelli wrote:
>On 12/12/05, Phillip J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
> > At 02:25 PM 12/12/2005 -0600, Ian Bicking wrote:
> > >That looks good to me.  Well, I actually try not to use cls as the first
> > >argument to metaclass's __new__ method, because there's so many classes
> > >being tossed about at that point that I try to be more explicit.  But I
> > >don't consider that a common enough issue to be worth mentioning in PEP 8.
> >
> > I usually use 'meta' as the first argument of a metaclass __new__ or a
> > metaclass classmethod, to avoid this particular bit of confusion.
>
>...while I use 'mcl' for the same purpose (seems closer to me in
>spirit to 'cls' than 'meta' would be); Guido said he liked that, at
>the time (a couple of years ago) when he was following a talk of mine
>on metaclasses where I introduced this convention.

I'd rather see 'metaclass' fully spelled out than resort to 'mcl'; 
metaclass code is tricky enough to write without figuring out 
abbreviations.  :)

Indeed, the only reason I use 'cls' is because it was Pronounced the 
standard; before the pronouncement I was using 'klass' as the argument name 
for class methods.