Hacker News Reader

Comment by DocSavage | Hacker News Reader

> Extraneous spaces annoy me to end.

It is recommended in the "official" python style guide to surround the assignment operator with a single space: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/

View on HN

And look how complicated they make it. Sometimes spaces, sometimes not, how confusing. And tell me that their "Use spaces around arithmetic operators" example doesn't make you want to puke:

          i = i + 1
          submitted += 1
          x = x * 2 - 1
          hypot2 = x * x + y * y
          c = (a + b) * (a - b)

Who writes like that?? I very strongly disagree.

I do. I think it looks a lot better and more clear. It certainly looks a lot like what I would write down on paper, and that is one of the inherent qualities of Python in general.

The one place that I don't follow the guideline (unless it's the guideline and I just don't know it... it rarely comes up, so I haven't bothered to check) is on array indices. I do write:

  a[i+1]

Same here. I conceptualize it as part of a code compactness strategy: array indices are part of the same item, and thus I use syntax (like yours) that suggests inlining.

Same here, for the same reason.

"Who writes like that??"

The authors of:

BitTorrent: https://develop.participatoryculture.org/trac/democracy/brow...

Django: http://code.djangoproject.com/browser/django/trunk/django/ut...

Pylons: http://pylonshq.com/project/pylonshq/browser/pylons/util.py

Twisted: http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/browser/trunk/twisted/python/u...

I do all of these (even in interactive shell) except I have a weak spot for this sort of notation:

    i+=2

I do. I find that code with the spaces around assignment and arithmetic operators is way easier to read.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com