[Python-Dev] PEP 7 and braces { .... } on if (original) (raw)

Victor Stinner victor.stinner at gmail.com
Wed May 31 10:13:58 EDT 2017

Previous discussion which added "strongly preferred" to the PEP 7, January 2016: https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2016-January/142746.html

Victor

2017-05-31 16:11 GMT+02:00 Victor Stinner <victor.stinner at gmail.com>:

Hi,

I have a question on the CPython coding code for C code, the PEP 7: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0007/ """ Code structure: (...); braces are strongly preferred but may be omitted where C permits, and they should be formatted as shown: if (mro != NULL) { ... } else { ... } """ This section was updated after the creation of CPython in 1991, so as you may expect, a lot of existing C code doesn't respect this coding style. I'm trying to slowly add "missing" braces and indent as the example when I have to modify existing code. The problem is the "strongly preferred" and "omitted where C permits" part. I would like to make the PEP 7 more explicit on that part since in each review, I disagree with Serhiy who wants to omit them. Example: if (func == NULL) return NULL; versus if (func == NULL) { return NULL; } I now prefer the version with braces. It's more verbose, but it prevents bugs when the code is modified later for whatever reasons. IMHO it also makes the code easily to read and to understand. So I would suggest to modify the PEP 7 to always require braces for if. I would also suggest to require braces on "for(...) { ... }" and "while(...) { ... }". But only if the code has to be modified, not only to update the coding style. Changes which are pure coding style changes should be rejected to avoid conflicts with other pending pull requests and "code churn". Victor

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