Adam DePrince wrote: > On Wed, 2006-04-12 at 05:15 -0700, Michael Chermside wrote: > >> When I see a variable name in all-caps, I don't assign to it. I don't >> even need a tool like PyChecker to remind me that this is a constant >> because I've been familiar with the "all-caps == constant" convention >> from shortly after I got a computer with lower-case letters on it. >> The other programmers I work with seem to behave the same way. I must >> be unusually lucky in this regard, because I meet lots of people who >> are very concerned about the fact that it *is* possible to change >> these values. I can only surmise that they work with people who make >> a habit of modifying all-caps variables randomly just for fun. >> > One thing we should consider is how euro-centric this convention is. > I'm not certain that all of the characters in all eastern languages can > be readily divided into upper and lower cases. IIRC one of the goals > with P3K is to allow Python to compile unicode source files, with that > this convention will eventually stop working. >
All identifiers have a standard naming convention involving case, so we should throw them out because maybe in the future someone will be able to write identifiers in Mandarin Chinese? I hope I never have to decipher such code. Also, at first I cared about giving constants all-capital names as a carry over from statically-typed languages, but eventually I dropped the convention. In the majority of cases where I might use a constant in a statically typed language, the constancy doesn't seem significant enough to denote in a Python variable name. And if I really need a unique object, I use the same convention the built-ins use (None, Ellipsis, etc.) _______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
