Coding Standards

The aeon codebase adheres to a number of coding standards. While these can feel restrictive at times, they are important for keeping the codebase readable and maintainable in a collaborative environment.

This page provides an overview of the aeon coding standards, with the most important being:

  • The PEP8 coding guidelines. A good example can be found here

  • Code formatting according to black and flake8

  • Documentation formatting using the numpydoc style

Code formatting and linting

Our coding standards are enforced through our CI/CD workflows via pre-commit. We adhere to the code formatting standards using the following pre-commit hooks:

  • black with default settings

  • flake8 with a max_line_length=88 and the flake8-bugbear and flake8-print plugins

  • isort to sort file imports

  • nbQA to lint and format Jupyter notebooks using the above hooks

  • ruff’s pydocstyle module to enforce the numpydoc documentation style

  • pyupgrade to upgrade Python syntax to modern standards

  • Some standard pre-commit hooks for general code quality

The full pre-commit configuration can be found in .pre-commit-config.yaml. Additional configurations for some hooks can be found in the pyproject.toml.

aeon specific code formatting conventions

  • Check out our glossary for preferred terminology

  • Use underscores to separate words in non-class names i.e.n_cases rather than n_cases.

  • Exceptionally, capital letters X, Y, Z, are permissible as variable names or part of variable names such as X_train if referring to data sets.

  • Use absolute imports for references inside aeon.

  • Don’t use import * in the source code. It is considered harmful by the official Python recommendations.

Using pre-commit

To set up pre-commit, follow these steps in a Python environment with the aeon dev dependencies installed.

Type the below in your Python environment, and in the root of your local repository clone:

  1. If not already done, ensure aeon with dev dependencies is installed, this includes pre-commit:

pip install -e .[dev]

  1. Set up pre-commit:

pre-commit install

Once installed, pre-commit will automatically run all aeon code quality checks on the files you changed whenever you make a new commit.

If you want to exclude some line of code from being checked, you can add a # noqa (no quality assurance) comment at the end of that line. This should only be used sparingly and with good reason. It is best to limit this to specific checks, i.e. # noqa: T201 for print statements.