Evaluate my first python script, please

[Pete Emerson]

On Mar 5, 10:19 am, "sjdevn... at yahoo.com" <sjdevn... at yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Mar 5, 10:53 am, Pete Emerson <pemer... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > Thanks for your response, further questions inline.
>
> > On Mar 4, 11:07 am, Tim Wintle <tim.win... at teamrubber.com> wrote:
>
> > > On Thu, 2010-03-04 at 10:39 -0800, Pete Emerson wrote:
> > > > I am looking for advice along the lines of "an easier way to do this"
> > > > or "a more python way" (I'm sure that's asking for trouble!) or
> > > > "people commonly do this instead" or "here's a slick trick" or "oh,
> > > > interesting, here's my version to do the same thing".
>
> > > (1) I would wrap it all in a function
>
> > > def main():
> > >     # your code here
>
> > > if __name__ == "__main__":
> > >     main()
>
> > Is this purely aesthetic reasons, or will I appreciate this when I
> > write my own modules, or something else?
>
> Suppose the above code is in mymodule.py.  By wrapping main() you can:
> 1. Have another module do:
> import mymodule
> ... (so some stuff, perhaps munge sys.argv)
> mymodule.main()
> 2. If mymodule has a small function in it, someone else can import it
> and call that function
> 3. You can run pylint, pychecker and other source-code checkers that
> need to be able to import your module to check it (I wouldn't be
> surprised if recent versions of one or the other of those don't
> require imports, and some checkers like pyflakes certainly don't).
> 4. You can easily have a unit tester call into the module
>
> etc.
>
> > > (2) PEP8 (python style guidelines) suggests one import per line
>
> > > (3) I'd use four spaces as tab width
>
> +1 on both; it's good to get into the habit of writing standard-
> looking Python code.

Agreed, noted, and appreciated, with the caveat that using spaces
instead of tabs might border on an emacs vs. vi flamewar in some
circles. I personally will use spaces going forward.