Should lesson code adhere to PEP8?

[petebachant]

Code like weight_lb = 2.2 * weight_kg should be weight_lb = 2.2*weight_kg according to PEP8. Does this matter here?

[gvwilson]

+1 to PEP-8 compliance.

[tbekolay]

I'm all for PEP8 compliance (vigilant about it, even!) but I don't think your example follows PEP8. I'm assuming you're thinking about this section. Having no whitespace around * only applies when you have a longer expression with implicit order of operations (removing the space is to make the order of operations explicit, even though it doesn't make a different to the interpreter). I think in general PEP8 favours more whitespace than less whitespace; it also favours not rigidly adhering to PEP8 if it makes code less readable. 2.2*weight_kg is less readable to my eyes.

[petebachant]

Looks like I understood PEP8 wrong; sorry about that! My example does not fail the pep8 test script in either incarnation, though I usually prefer no whitespace around * to make it easier to distinguish addition from multiplication.

Maybe a compliance check could be automated by extracting all code from the lessons and running that through pep8? Is there a tool to convert Markdown to Python in this way, commenting out the text so line numbers are preserved?

[tbekolay]

Such a check would be great, and could be incorporated into existing checks. I'm not aware of any tool out there to do this right now; if there were, it'd probably have to be customized anyhow since our code blocks are fenced off with ~~~ {.python}, which I've not seen elsewhere. Still, seems like not too tough of a script to write!

[petebachant]

Alright, I will take a crack at it when I get a chance.

[franktoffel]

@tbekolay @petebachant

This small script may help:
https://gist.github.com/Juanlu001/9082229

Are the python lessons in IPYNB format?