alignment addresses the discouraged practice of using a variable number of spaces to align certain tokens with previous lines. 4.6 Whitespace 4.6.1 Vertical Whitespace A single blank line appears: 1 variable number of additional spaces in your code with the goal of making certain tokens appear directly below certain other tokens on previous lines. This practice is permitted, but is never required by Google

complex(real, imag = 0.0): return magic(r = real, i = imag) 19 Don’t use spaces to vertically align tokens on consecutive lines, since it becomes a maintenance burden (applies to :, #, =, etc.): Yes: foo