General design principles

The received Python wisdom is to use “duck typing”: instead of explicitly checking isinstance(obj, Duck), assume anything with a quack() method will do the job. For large-scale projects this philosophy can be questioned, but it’s what we adopt here.

General code style

• We aim for 80 character width, but treat this as a guideline, since readability should come first.

• For standard library imports, we prefer “import” rather than “import from”.