Notes for CREDO developers / maintainers

Coding standards / style guides

On recommendation of the majority of Python tutorials out there, we are following the standard Python style guide, at http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/.

Some of the notable things here are:

• Use 4 spaces for indentation, instead of tabs (obviously crucial to be consistent about this in Python, since indenting whitespace is used to control blocks.
• Spaces around assignment symbols, =, but not between brackets and arguments.

Where we ‘break’ any of these rules in the package, we’ll document this here.

Testing framework

Currently, we use the Python Unittest framework. Tests are mainly organised per file (module), rather than per class.

It’s important to write unit tests for all new classes and to maintain and improve the suite for existing ones. Unittest is pretty easy to use and is well documented.