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[Python-Dev] pep8 reasoning

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Sat Apr 26 06:31:57 CEST 2014 
Florent writes:

 > I wrote some words in the documentation, one year ago, to explain what
 > is the purpose of the tool and its limitations. There's no claim of
 > any endorsement implicit or explicit by the PSF, the PSU or any other
 > python developer :-)

Of course there is an implicit claim of endorsement: the name.  Read
the TeX license -- pretty much the only restriction is *you can't call
it "TeX" or any variation including that trademark if it doesn't pass
TRIP*.  When Don Knuth cares that much that names denote conformance
to standard, Nick is in really good company.

I agree 100% with Nick: in a program named "pep8", the examples in PEP
8 should *all* pass in the sense of not being labelled errors.  Of
course if the PEP changes that doesn't mean you should withdraw or
rename the program, or even that you are required to address the issue
within any time span.  But you should consider it a bug.

That said, issuing *warnings* for discouraged-but-sometimes-allowed
practices is a great idea.  A stricter warnings-are-errors *mode* is a
good idea, especially for automated checkers, but it should be
configurable for different policies.

 > http://pep8.readthedocs.org/en/latest/intro.html#disclaimer

Disclaimers are for lawyers.  Other people assume names mean what they
say.
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