Best Practices¶

Coding and documentation¶

We recommend using a tool to help ensure PEP 8 compliance. PyCharm does a good job at this and other code quality checks.

The ARL has been designed in line with the following principles:

Data are held in Classes.
The Data Classes correspond to familiar concepts in radio astronomy packages e.g. visibility, gaintable, image.
The data members of the Data Classes are directly accessible by name e.g. .data, .name. .phasecentre.
Direct access to the data members is envisaged.
There are no methods attached to the data classes apart from variant constructors as needed.
Standalone, stateless functions are used for all processing.

Additions and changes should adhere to these principles.

ARL is hosted on the SDP github .

We are open to pull requests submitted via github.