[Python-Dev] Tweaking PEP 8 guidelines for use of leading underscores (original) (raw)

Steven D'Aprano steve at pearwood.info
Tue Jul 16 03:25:03 CEST 2013

On 16/07/13 10:23, Chris McDonough wrote:

If what's being described here does become a rule, there is reason to believe that future users who treat this PEP as the word-of-god (and there are a lot of them; I hear from people literally every week who want to "PEP8-ify" my code in some limited-value-added way) will be harmed.

I sympathise with your pain, but is that not true of every PEP 8 naming convention?

They'll be living in a fantasy world where every non-underscore-prefixed thing is now a defacto API.

If your code has no obvious, documented convention at all for what's internal and what is not, they are no worse off.

If you do have a documented convention for internal implementation details, then you are no worse off. "I have better things to do than PEP8-ify old, working, stable code" is a perfectly acceptable answer. "I have better things to do than PEP9-ify old, working, stable code, but if you want to provide regression tests and a working patch, I'll let you do so" might be an even better one :-)

-- Steven

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