Given I've never even heard of Strunk & White (my own privilege i'd assume)... yeah. I don't actually know what the existing "When writing English, follow Strunk and White." text in PEP-8 even means. It doesn't hyperlink to an online source for English style probably because this was written so long ago, but I wouldn't want it to anyways. People shouldn't be arguing about "proper" English within comments anyways. Is it readable to all involved and to the next folks involved (future selves included) who will read it several years later? Good enough. Perhaps just send a PR removing that sentence to simplify things? -gps On Fri, Jun 26, 2020 at 2:29 PM Keara Berlin <kearaberlin@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi all, this is a very small change, but I thought I would field it here to see if anyone has suggestions or ideas. Instead of requiring that comments be written in Strunk & White Standard English, PEP-8 should require instead that English-language comments be clear and easily understandable by other English speakers. This accomplishes the same goal without alienating or putting up barriers for people (especially people of color) whose native dialect of English is not Standard English. This change is a simple way to correct that while maintaining the original intent of the requirement. This change may even make the requirement more clear to people who are not familiar with Strunk & White, since for programmers, the main relevant aspect of that standard is "be clear and concise;" simply saying that instead of referencing Strunk & White may communicate this more effectively. Here is the current line in PEP-8: "When writing English, follow Strunk and White." I propose changing this line to "When writing English, ensure that your comments are clear and easily understandable to other English speakers." _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-leave@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/AE2M7K... Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/