Is PEP-8 a Code or More of a Guideline?

[Roy Smith]

Dave Hansen <iddw at hotmail.com> wrote:

> On May 27, 3:25 pm, Roy Smith <r... at panix.com> wrote:
> > Ben Finney <bignose+hates-s... at benfinney.id.au> wrote:
> > > Is C no longer a "major" language? The long-standing convention there
> > > is for lower_case_with_underscores.
> >
> > Which dates back to the days of ASR-33's which only had one case (upper
> 
> The date is about right (actually, a little early: ASR-33, 1965; C,
> about 1970), but you can't program C on an ASR-33.

Damn, I wish I had known that at the time :-)

> Keywords are all
> lower case, and always have been.  "IF" is a syntax error...

I doubt it still works on anything made today, but back in those days, if 
you typed your login name in all upper case, the terminal was put into 
lcase mode.  Upper case on input was automatically converted to lower case.  
You typed "IF", the C compiler saw "if", and it all worked.  Including \( 
and \) for curly braces.