

For instance, in cal_area(length, breadth) or send_msg(message, recipient), the developer doesn't have to worry about remembering that these two functions require 2 arguments, or their order. Positional arguments are fully part of the function's meaning, and their order will be the order in which they are defined. Positional arguments: These are the simplest form of arguments.

There are four different ways of passing arguments to a function: Remember to keep things simple and explicit.Īnother pitfall of this bad practice is that if you pass in more than 2 parameters while calling the function: make_complex(1,2,3), it would throw a valueError like this: Best practice is to specify what’s needed, and follow the most straight-forward approach. The above function will return ‘z’:3 too in the locals dict. This is redundant as we needed just x and y whereas it returns ‘args’ as well.Īlso, if we had: def make_complex(*args): The simplest (and easiest to understand) way of writing code is always the best. These are allowed and accepted for their brevity and their expressiveness. The only exception is list comprehensions and a few other compound statements. If you're writing disjointed statements in a single line, you're violating the essence of Python.

In this post, we are going to talk about a few very important style guidelines and Pythonic idioms, and how to deal with legacy code.

Readability and simplistic syntax is at the heart of Python. These are one of the key reasons for the high readability of Pythonic code. But what exactly is Pythonic code, and how should you remember the major pain points/avoid obvious (bad) practices?įortunately, the Python community is blessed with a relatively simple and complete set of code style guidelines and "Pythonic" idioms. If you're someone who has spent some time writing Pythonic code, you will have come across the best practices. All veteran Python developers (Pythonistas) preach about writing Pythonic code.
