ASE Manual Release 3.6.1.2825 CAMd - CampOS Wiki

ASE Manual, Release 3.6.1.2828
• Use ‘single quotes’ for string literals, and “”“triple double quotes”“” for docstrings. Double quotes are OK
for something like "don’t".
Attention: Thus spake the Lord: Thou shalt indent with four spaces. No more, no less. Four shall be the
number of spaces thou shalt indent, and the number of thy indenting shall be four. Eight shalt thou not indent,
nor either indent thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to four. Tabs are right out.
Georg Brandl
General advice
• Get rid of as many break and continue statements as possible.
Writing documentation in the code
Here is an example of how to write good docstrings:
http://projects.scipy.org/numpy/browser/trunk/doc/example.py
Run pep8.py on your code
The pep8.py program is installed together with ASE tools/pep8.py. It will check the PEP8 conventions for you.
Try:
$ pep8.py --help
Using pylint to check your code
A pylintrc trying to follow ASE Coding Conventions can be found here: doc/development/pylintrc
Running pylint yourself
Run pylint on a single file like this:
[~]$ pylint mypythonfile.py
Run pylint on a module like this:
[~]$ pylint path/to/module/root/dir
Output from pylint run on ASE
• pylint_ase
Run epydoc on your code
Run:
$ epydoc --docformat restructuredtext --parse-only --show-imports -v dir
11.1.6 Writing documentation
We use the Sphinx tool to generate the documentation (both HTML and PDF). The documentation is stored in
SVN as text files in the doc directory using the reStructuredText markup language.
190 Chapter 11. ASE development