[Python-Dev] PEP 7 clarification request: braces (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Mon Jan 2 11:15:25 CET 2012

On Mon, Jan 2, 2012 at 6:47 PM, Raymond Hettinger <raymond.hettinger at gmail.com> wrote:

Really?  Do we need to have a brace war? People have different preferences. The standard library includes some of both styles depending on what the maintainer thought was cleanest to their eyes in a given context.

If the answer is "either form is OK", I'm actually fine with that (and will update PEP 7 accordingly). However, I have long read PEP 7 as requiring the braces, and until noticing their absence in some of Benjamin's checkins and the recent conflicting advice we gave when reviewing the same patch, I had never encountered their absence in the CPython code base outside the one-liner/two-liner case*.

Since I do feel strongly that leaving them out is a mistake that encourages future defects, and read PEP 7 as agreeing with that (aside from the general "follow conventions in surrounding code" escape clause), I figured it was better to bring it up explicitly and clarify PEP 7 accordingly (since what is currently there is clearly ambiguous enough for two current committers to have diametrically opposed views on what it says).

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia

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