Coding standards are accepted by the team and reviewed regularly to ensure consistency in our code base. Standards are a work in progress, and part of the code review process should be ensuring compliance with the accepted standards.
We follow PEP8, with specified choices where PEP8 is indifferent. Examples can be found in the original specification. At a high level, ensure code developed follows the following rules that we have highlighted:
- Function and variable names must be declared in
snake_case, exceptsetUpandtearDowninunittesttest classes. - Class names must be declared in
StudlyCaps. - 4 spaces per indentation level, no tabs.
- Imports should be on separate lines (incorrect:
import os, sys). - Absolute imports are preferred (
from mypkg import siblinginstead ofimport mypkgand callingmypkg.sibling). - PEP8 is impartial to single or double quotes as long as they are consistent. Our Python projects use single quotes, except for docstrings (triple-quoted strings). Use double quotes when a string contains single or double quote characters to avoid backslashes (escaping) in the string.
- Comparisons to singletons (i.e.
None) should always be done withisoris notrather than==or!=.
We follow PEP257, with one specific addition. Examples can be found in the original specification. At a high level, ensure code developed includes docstrings that fit the following guidelines:
- All docstrings should be triple-quoted (
"""Example docstring"""). - For one-liner docstrings:
- triple quotes should be on the same line as the opening quotes
- no blank line before or after the docstring unless it is documenting a class
- Multi-line docstrings consists of a summary (one-line only) followed by a blank line, followed by a more detailed description.
- Although not specified in PEP257, we include a blank line after class definitions without doctrings to be consistent with those with docstrings.