Question

I’ve never been a huge Python fan. I learned it for a course where the teacher was really into it, but his enthusiasm never quite made it to the rest of our class it seems: as soon as we had the chance, we all jumped off to C#/Java.

Anyways. This wasn’t a concluding experience, and what annoyed me the most in the language was that to find out if Python code would work, you actually have to execute it, and risk dying halfway through because of something stupid like a typo in a variable name (throwing up a NameError). Stuff that compilers for compiled languages catch at the very first glance, but that Python won’t bother to complain about until it’s too late. (I know you can always die half through a test with compiled programs too, but at least it won’t be from a typo.)

I’m not really giving it a second chance yet, but for the sake of the next students, are there Python statical analysis or validation tools out there that would catch most errors (I understand you can’t catch them all) compilers would catch at compile-time?

Answer 1

Take a look at the following programs:

• pylint
• pyflakes
• pychecker