Guido sees the light: PEP 8 updated

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, Apr 17, 2016 at 9:01 PM, Marko Rauhamaa <marko at pacujo.net> wrote:
> In fact, if you find yourself introducing coding "paragraphs" with
> comments:
>
>     def f(...):
>         # I'll start by doing this
>         ...
>         # segueing into the middle portion
>         ...
>         # and finish it off as follows
>         ...
>
> you had better break those paragraphs off into separate functions. Just
> turn your comments into function names.

It's really easy to do this in toy examples, isn't it? But the real
world is not so wonderful, as Alice's nanny said. What more often
happens is that, once the function exceeds the stipulated maximum, it
gets split somewhat arbitrarily into a "master" function and several
"part" functions, with each part having exactly one call site in the
driver and exactly none elsewhere. Even if the partial functions have
reasonable names (which they don't always), they're still tightly
bound to the master, and end up still functioning as a single unit.

Unless you can genuinely make that subfunction useful in some other
context, there's not a lot of use splitting it into a function. You
don't generally see those perfect "paragraphs" in real-world code.

ChrisA