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So I am trying to switch to PEP8 notation (from a rather personal CamelCase notation) and I was wondering how you guys are tackling the cases where existing functions/variables would be overwritten?

e.g. having something like:

open, high, low, close, sum = row

would already overwrite the "open" and "sum" functions. First, if I wouldn't use a good IDE, I wouldn't even notice that I've just overwritten important basic functions. Second, how would you name the variables instead? In this example I would have used apps hungarian and wouldn't have encountered any potential problem at all.

Thanks!

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5 Answers 5

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Why not just pick non-conflicting names? Such as opening_price, closing_price and total if that's what they represent. While it's possible to qualify the namespace as in the other replies, surely that shouldn't be needed for local variables. Whatever language you program in it's your job to know the reserved words; there aren't that many of them.

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8

I would use open_ and sum_.

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While this is what PEP8 suggests, why not just pick non-conflicting names? Such as opening_price, closing_price and total if that's what they represent. While it's possible to qualify the namespace as in the other replies, surely that shouldn't be needed for local variables. Whatever language you program in it's your job to know the reserved words; there aren't that many of them.
@SideshowBob I think you should submit your comment as an answer, because it is, in my mind, the best, simplest, most obvious and most idiomatic solution to the OP's problem.
guys, thanks a lot - I'll go with Sideshow Bob's solution. The initial reason why I didn't do this was because I use these variables so often that using something like opening_price everywhere would eventually look cluttered. So for exactly this reason, I will simply use o, h, l, c instead, since these variables are only used locally in functions and they are used so often that it makes sense to keep them as short as possible. Let me know if you disagree. Thanks!
Short variable names are tempting and we all do it no doubt, but they are not generally thought of as good software engineering practice except for things like loop indices. Especially o and l which in some fonts or in a hurry look a lot like 0 and 1. By all means shorten a bit if you want - openprice rather than opening_price. If you must use uber-short names, explain what they mean in a comment.
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In this particular case, I'd use a namedtuple. This would turn those names into qualified ones (data.open, data.low, etc.).

from collections import namedtuple
Data = namedtuple('Data', ['open', 'high', 'low' 'close', 'sum'])

data = Data(*row)

This would eliminate the prospect of name clashes with built-in functions, and likely improve the overall readability along the way.

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3

If they are all values from the same domain, you can use a dictionary:

params = ('open', 'high', 'low', 'close', 'sum') # defined once

val = dict(zip(params, row)) # for each row

# val == {'open': 12, 'high': 34, 'low': 56, 'close': 78, 'sum': 90}

Then you can access them directly: val['open']. You can iterate over them val.iteritems() and so on.

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Pep8 recommends using trailing underscore, however there is also mentioned that in possible cases using synonym word for the variable would be better idea.

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