More pythonic circle?

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sat, 08 Apr 2006 21:17:32 -0700, Pythor wrote:

>> (3) legibility: there's no prize for the script with the absolutely
>> minimum number of space characters :-)
> True.  I assume your saying I should make cx,cy,dx, and dy better
> names.  I probably will.  Up to now I was just playing around with
> this, and not really expecting anyone else to read it.

No, "minimum number of space characters" means "you don't use enough
spaces", not "your variable names are too short" *wink*

Generally speaking, a little bit of whitespace helps makes text more
readable, at least for native speakers of languages derived from Latin and
other Indo-European languages. Graphic designers tend to manually adjust
the spacing between paragraphs, lines, words and even characters, but it
isn't necessary to go to that extreme to increase readability.

People's tastes vary, and these are not rules, only guidelines, but it is
usual to leave one (and sometimes more) blank lines between functions and
methods, and even between logical sections of a single function.

Within a single line, a good guideline is to leave a single space on
either side of pluses and minuses (e.g. x**2 + 5*x - 3). Likewise, a
single space on both sides of an equal sign and a single space after
commas tend to be usual.

As I said, none of these are hard and fast rules, but breaking up the flow
of tokens will increase readability immensely.

See Guido van Rossum's style guide and the official Python style guide. As
usual, Guido is always right, and if his style guide contradicts me, he's
wrong but you should follow his guide anyway *smiles*

http://www.python.org/doc/essays/styleguide.html
http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/

As for variables cx, cy, dx and dy, I don't believe that they are unclear.
If your function is highly mathematical in nature, I believe it is
acceptable if not expected to follow standard mathematical conventions
such as r for radius, x and y for real numbers, z for complex, dx for
delta (change of) x, etc. If in doubt, when initialising the variable add
a comment spelling it out in full.

On the other hand, you do have an argument "value" with default 255, with
not even hint for what it is.


-- 
Steven.