Style Guide#

Coding Style#

Code follows the Python PEP8 style guide. This is enforced via the black formatter and the pre-commit hook set up in Getting Started for Developers.

You can also use black \<filename\> to reformat your code by hand or install editor plugins.

API Documentation Style#

All functions, classes, and modules should contain appropriate API documentation in their docstrings. The docstrings should be written in ReStructuredText format (same as the Sphinx high-level documentation), and should follow the NumPy Docstring Standards

Documentation for all algorithms should contain citations to external works, which should be collected in bibliography.rst. An example of citing a reference in that file:

this algorithm is an implementation of [author2003]_

Interactive Development Environment#

It is recommended that a fully python-aware interactive development environment (IDE) is used to develop code, rather than a basic text editor. IDEs will automatically mark lines that have style problems. The recommended IDEs are:

PyCharm CE (Jetbrains)
emacs with the elpy package installed
PyDev (Eclipse)

The IDEs provide a lot of support for avoiding common style and coding mistakes, and automatic re-formatting (e.g. M-x py-autopep8-buffer in emacs).