Re: [Pyparsing] PEP-8 compliant naming, using synonyms

[Joshua J. K. <jk...@sk...>]

On Fri, 2008-03-07 at 08:34 -0600, Paul McGuire wrote:
> A while back, there was a suggestion to adopt PEP-8 compliant names in
> pyparsing.  For example, oneOf, delimitedList, and quotedString do not
> conform to the PEP-8 recommended naming style.  According to PEP-8, these
> should be one_of, delimited_list, and quoted_string.  For this discussion,
> I'll call these two naming styles "mixedCase" and "names_with_underscores".
> <SNIP>
> Any comments?

Funny you should bring this up.  When I first started reading the docs
for pyparsing, one of my first (albeit fleeting) thoughts was, "Hmm,
interesting, he doesn't follow PEP-8, the module must have been written
in the early days of Python before PEP-8 was well established."  I've
gone through a lot of naming conventions in my programming experience.
mostly_underscores when I did a lot of perl, MixedCase and
varHungarianNotation (shudder) when I did VB programming, and even mixed
case when I was starting in Python before I read PEP-8.

I'm not a fanatic of one style over another, really, and in fact kind of
like the look of MixedCase.  But I do like consistency, and if there is
a "blessed" way of doing things (as I would consider PEP-8 to be) I
would tend to lean in that direction.  In addition to the reason
regarding vision-imparied programmers, I would also add that MixedCase,
even if it is capitalizing every word, could still be harder for
non-native English speakers to read than words separated by underscores.

So, in short, I support the aliasing, and possibly the eventual
replacement, with PEP-8 compliant names.  Implementation idea: rename
all the functions to PEP-8 compliant names, and make wrappers using the
old names.  Then the wrappers would print out 'suchAndSuch deprecated,
use such_and_such instead.

Something else to thing about: what does PEP-8 say about keyword
arguments?  Like I said, I don't really prefer one over the other, but I
do like consistency.

j

-- 
Joshua Kugler
VOC/SigNet Provider (aka Web App Programmer)
S&K Aerospace Alaska