The Python Oracle

Why True/False is capitalized in Python?

This video explains
Why True/False is capitalized in Python?

--

Become part of the top 3% of the developers by applying to Toptal
https://topt.al/25cXVn

--

Music by Eric Matyas
https://www.soundimage.org
Track title: Lost Jungle Looping

--

Chapters
00:00 Question
00:21 Accepted answer (Score 85)
01:05 Answer 2 (Score 17)
01:20 Answer 3 (Score 5)
02:05 Answer 4 (Score -3)
02:35 Thank you

--

Full question
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5214...

Accepted answer links:
[Pep 285]: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0285/
[all (most)? built-in constants are capitalized]: http://docs.python.org/library/constants...

Answer 2 links:
[built-in constants]: http://docs.python.org/library/constants...

Answer 3 links:
[possible explaination]: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-...

--

Content licensed under CC BY-SA
https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/lice...

--

Tags
#python #camelcasing

#avk47



ACCEPTED ANSWER

Score 89


From Pep 285:

Should the constants be called 'True' and 'False' (similar to None) or 'true' and 'false' (as in C++, Java and C99)?

=> True and False.

Most reviewers agree that consistency within Python is more important than consistency with other languages.

This, as Andrew points out, is probably because all (most)? built-in constants are capitalized.




ANSWER 2

Score 18


All of python's built-in constants are capitalized or [upper] CamelCase:




ANSWER 3

Score 6


Here's a possible explaination:

I see that naming conventions are such that classes usually get named CamelCase. So why are the built-in types named all lowercase (like list, dict, set, bool, etc.)?

Because most of them originally were types and factory functions, not
classes - and a naming convention is not a strong reason to make backwards incompatible changes. A different example: the new builtin type set is based on (altough not exactly equal to) the Set class from the sets module