Docstring Conventions

Style Guide For Python Code

    is preferred.

  Descriptive: Naming Styles

    There are a lot of different naming styles.  It helps to be able to

    recognize what naming style is being used, independently from what they

    are used for.

    The following naming styles are commonly distinguished:

    - b (single lowercase letter)

    - B (single uppercase letter)

    - lowercase

    - lower_case_with_underscores

    - UPPERCASE

    - UPPER_CASE_WITH_UNDERSCORES

    - CapitalizedWords (or CapWords, or CamelCase -- so named because

      of the bumpy look of its letters[4]).  This is also sometimes known as

      StudlyCaps.

      Note: When using abbreviations in CapWords, capitalize all the letters

      of the abbreviation.  Thus HTTPServerError is better than

      HttpServerError.

    - mixedCase (differs from CapitalizedWords by initial lowercase

      character!)

    - Capitalized_Words_With_Underscores (ugly!)

    There's also the style of using a short unique prefix to group related

    names together.  This is not used much in Python, but it is mentioned for

    completeness.  For example, the os.stat() function returns a tuple whose

    items traditionally have names like st_mode, st_size, st_mtime and so on.

    (This is done to emphasize the correspondence with the fields of the

    POSIX system call struct, which helps programmers familiar with that.)

    The X11 library uses a leading X for all its public functions.  In Python,

    this style is generally deemed unnecessary because attribute and method

    names are prefixed with an object, and function names are prefixed with a

    module name.

    In addition, the following special forms using leading or trailing

    underscores are recognized (these can generally be combined with any case

    convention):

    - _single_leading_underscore: weak "internal use" indicator.  E.g. "from M

      import *" does not import objects whose name starts with an underscore.

    - single_trailing_underscore_: used by convention to avoid conflicts with

      Python keyword, e.g.

      Tkinter.Toplevel(master, class_='ClassName')

    - __double_leading_underscore: when naming a class attribute, invokes name

      mangling (inside class FooBar, __boo becomes _FooBar__boo; see below).

    - __double_leading_and_trailing_underscore__: "magic" objects or