PEP8 has naming conventions for e.g. functions (lowercase), classes (CamelCase) and constants (uppercase).
It seems to me that distinguishing between numpy arrays and built-ins such as lists is probably more important as the same operators such as "+" actually mean something totally different.
Does anyone have any naming conventions to help with this?
You may use a prefix np_ for numpy arrays, thus distinguishing them from other variables.
numpy arrays and lists should occupy similar syntactic roles in your code and as such I wouldn't try to distinguish between them by naming conventions. Since everything in python is an object the usual naming conventions are there not to help distinguish type so much as usage. Data, whether represented in a list or a numpy.ndarray has the same usage.
I agree that it's awkward that eg. + means different things for lists and arrays. I implicitly deal with this by never putting anything like numerical data in a list but rather always in an array. That way I know if I want to concatenate blocks of data I should be using numpy.hstack. That said, there are definitely cases where I want to build up a list through concatenation and turn it into a numpy array when I'm done. In those cases the code block is usually short enough that it's clear what's going on. Some comments in the code never hurt.
