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

[Steven Bethard]

Stefan Sonnenberg-Carstens wrote:
> Paul McGuire schrieb:
>> I'm starting a new thread for this topic, so as not to hijack the one
>> started by Steve Howell's excellent post titled "ten small Python
>> programs".
>>
>> In that thread, there was a suggestion that these examples should
>> conform to PEP-8's style recommendations, including use of
>> lower_case_with_underscores style for function names.  I raised some
>> questions about this suggestion, since I liked the names the way they
>> were, but as a result, part of the discussion has drifted into a
>> separate track about PEP-8, and naming styles.
>
> I prefer mixedCaseStyle, and I think that should be "standard", as this 
> style is commonly
> used in all "major" languages , for example Java,C++,C#.
> It shortens the identifiers but leaves the meaning intact.

The argument for under_score_names is usually that non-native speakers 
can more easily find the word boundaries. Not being a non-native speaker 
;-) I can't verify that one, but it's pretty plausible given the current 
amount of money spent on research on automatic word-segmentation for 
languages like Chinese. =)

STeVe