Question

I know the PEP-8 convention for class names is ClassName. But we often use small classes as pseudo-namespaces, enums etc. In other words, not a real class that you’re going to instantiate. We’ve opted for a lowercase naming convention for such “classes”, because they’re really a namespace/enum name.

Does anyone else have in-house styles for this, or other ways of achieving the same thing?

An example:

import urllib2

class config:  # pseudo-namespace for module-level config variables
    api_url = 'http://example.com/api'
    timeout = 1.5
    debug = True

class countries:  # pseudo-enum
    new_zealand = 1
    united_states = 2

def func():
    if config.debug:
        print 'Calling func()'
    return urllib2.urlopen(config.api_url)

Answer 1

For all enums and constants, I prefer to use capitalized versions.

class COUNTRIES:  # pseudo-enum
    NEW_ZEALAND = 1
    UNITED_STATES = 2

It is still ok with me, if the class name is not all capitalized. Since, any way it is tied up with the enum values. I am always going to use it like Countries.NEW_ZEALAND, which tells me that it is an enum.

class Countries:  # pseudo-enum
    NEW_ZEALAND = 1
    UNITED_STATES = 2