Python guidelines

General guidelines to improve the quality and readability of our python code. For python, see the C++ guidelines.

General

PREFER iterating over containers to indexing containers manually
PREFER argparse over getopt
ALWAYS use ruff-format (for new code) and ruff-check
ALWAYS place import statements at the top of the file
NEVER run non-trivial code at the top-level scope of your module, so that it can be imported without side-effects. INSTEAD, hide this code behind an if __name__ == "__main__": condition